“You must have had a lot of fun designing those,” Anana said to Urthona.
“It was more amusing designing them than watching them in action,” her uncle said. “In fact, designing this world entertained me more than living on it. I got bored in less than four years and left it. But I have been back now and then during the past ten thousand years to renew my acquaintance with it.”
“When was the last time?”
“Oh, about five hundred years ago, I think.”
“Then you must have made another world for your headquarters. One more diversified, more beautiful, I’d imagine.”
Urthona smiled. “Of course. I also am Lord of three more, worlds which I took over after I’d killed their owners. You remember your cousin Bromion, that bitch Ethinthus, and Antamon? They’re dead now, and I, I rule their worlds!”
“Do you indeed now?” Anana said. “I wouldn’t say you were sitting on any thrones now. Unless you call captivity, the immediate danger of death and torture, thrones.”
Urthona snarled, and said, “I’ll do you as I did them, my leblabbiy-loving niece! And I’ll come back here and wipe out these miserable scum! In fact, I may just wipe out this whole world! Cancel it!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Anana shook her head. “Uncle, I was once like you. That is, utterly unworthy of life. But there was something in me that gave me misgivings. Let us call it a residue of compassion, of empathy. Deep under the coldness and cruelty and arrogance was a spark. And that spark was fanned into a great fire, fanned by a leblabbiy called Kickaha. He’s not a Lord, but he is a man. That’s more than you ever were or will be. And these brutish miserable creatures who’ve captured you, and don’t know they hold the Lord of their crazy world captive … they’re more human than you could conceive. That is, they’re retarded Lords …”
Urthona stared and said, “What in The Spinner’s name are you talking about?”
Anana felt like hitting him. But she said, “You wouldn’t ever understand. Maybe I shouldn’t say ever. After all, I came to understand. But that was because I was forced to be among the leblabbiy for a long time.”
“And this leblabbiy, Kickaha, this descendant of an artificial product, corrupted your mind. It’s too bad the Council is no longer in effect. You’d be condemned and killed within ten minutes.”
Anana ran her gaze up and down him several times, her expression contemptuous. “Don’t forget, uncle, that you, too, may be the descendant of an artificial product. Of creatures created in a laboratory. Don’t forget what Shambarimen speculated with much evidence to back his statement. That we, too, the Lords, the Lords, may have been made in the laboratories of beings who are as high above us as we are above the leblabbiy. Or I should say as high above them as we are supposed to be.
“After all, we made the leblabbiy in our image. Which means that they are neither above nor below us. They are us. But they don’t know that, and they have to live in worlds which we created. Made, rather. We are not creators, any more than writers of fiction or painters are creators. They make worlds, but they are never able to make more than what they know. They can write or paint worlds based on elements of the known, put together in a different order in a way to make them seem to be creators.
“We, the so-called Lords, did no more than poets, writers, and painters and sculptors. We were not and are not gods. Though we’ve come to think of ourselves as such.”
“Spare me your lectures,” Urthona said. “I don’t care for your attempts to justify your degeneracy.”
Anana shrugged and said, “You’re hopeless. But in a way you’re right. The thing to talk about is how we can escape.”
“Yeah,” McKay said. “Just how we going to do that?”
“However we do it,” she said, “we can’t go without the knife and the axe and the Horn. We’d be helpless in this savage world without them. The chief has the axe and the Horn, so we have to get them away from him.”
She didn’t think she should say anything about the knife in the jeans. They’d noticed it was gone, but she had told them she’d lost it during her flight from them.
A man untied their hobbles, and they resumed the march with the others. Anana went back to her language lessons with Nurgo.
When the tribe got to the pass, it stopped again. She didn’t need to ask why. The country beyond the two mountains was black with clouds in which lived a hell of lightning bolts. It would be committing suicide to venture into it. But when a whole day and night passed, and the storm still raged, she did question the youth.
“The Lord sends down thunder and lightning into this country. He topples trees and slays beasts and any human who is foolish enough to dare him.”
“That is why we only go into the sea-country when his wrath has cooled off. Otherwise, we would live there all the time. The land changes shape very slowly and insignificantly. The water is full of fish, and the trees, which do not walk, are full of birds that are good to eat. The trees also bear nuts, and there are bushes, which also do not walk, that are heavy with berries. And the game is plentiful and easier caught than on the open plains.
“If we could live there all the time, we would get fat and our children would thrive and our tribe would become more numerous and powerful. But the Lord, in his great wisdom, has decreed that we can only live there for a little while. Then the clouds gather, and his lightning strikes, and the land is no place for anyone who knows what’s good for him.”
Anana did not, of course, understand everything he said. But she could supply the meaning from what phrases she had mastered.
She went to Urthona and asked him why he had made such an arrangement in the sea-country.
“For my entertainment. I liked to send my palace into that land and watch the fury of the lightning, see the devastation. I was safe and snug in my palace, but I got a joy out of seeing the lightning blaze and crack around me. Then I truly felt like a god.
“Also, if it weren’t for their fear of being killed, the humans would crowd in. It’d be fun to watch them fight each other for the territory. In fact, it was fun during the stormless seasons. But if there were nothing to keep them from settling down there, they’d never go back into the shifting areas.
“There are, if I remember correctly, twelve of those areas. The seas and the surrounding land each cover about five million square miles. So in an area of 200,000,000 square miles there are 60,000,000 square miles of relatively stable topography. These are never separated from the main mass, and the splitoffs never occur near the seas.
“The lightning season was designed to drive beast and human out of the sea-country except at certain times. Otherwise, they’d get overcrowded.”
He stopped to point at the plain. Anana turned and saw that it was now covered with herds of animals: elephants, moosoids, antelopes, and many small creatures. The mountains were dark with birds that had settled on them. And the skies were black with millions of flying creatures.
“They migrate from near and far,” Urthona said. “They come to enjoy the sea and the wooded lands while they can. Then, when the storms start, they leave.”
Anana wandered away. As long as she didn’t get very far from the camp, she was free to roam around. She approached the chief, who was sitting on the ground and striking the ground with the axe. She squatted down before him.
“When will the storms cease?” she said.
His eyes widened. “You have learned our language very quickly. Good. Now I can ask you some questions.”
“I asked one first,” she said.
He frowned. “The Lord should have ceased being angry and gone back to his palace before now. Usually, the lightning would have stopped two light-periods ago. For some reason, the Lord is very angry and he is still raging. I hope he gets tired of it and goes home soon. The beasts and the birds are coming in great numbers. It’s a dangerous situation. If a stampede should start, we could be trampled to death. We would have to jump into the water to save ourselves, and that
would be bad because our grewigg would be lost along with our supplies.”
Grewigg was the plural of gregg, the word for a moosoid.
Anana said, “I wondered why you weren’t hunting when so many animals were close by.”
The chief, Trenn, shuddered. “We’re not stupid. Now, what tribe is yours? And is it near here?”
Anana wondered if he would accept the truth. After all, his tribe, the Wendow, might have a tradition of having come from another world.
“We are not natives of this … place.” She waved a hand to indicate the universe, and the flies, alarmed, rose and whirled around buzzing. They quickly settled back, however, lighting on her body, her face, and her arms. She brushed them away from her face. The chief endured the insects crawling all over him and into his empty eye-socket. Possibly, he wasn’t even aware of them.
“We came through a …” She paused. She didn’t know the word for gate. Maybe there wasn’t any. “We came through a pass between two … I don’t know how to say it. We came from beyond the sky. From another place where the sky is … the color of that bird there.”
She pointed to a small blue bird which had landed by the channel.
The chief’s eye got even larger. “Ah, you came from the place where our ancestors lived. The place from which the Lord drove our forefathers countless light-periods ago because they had sinned. Tell me, why did the Lord drive you here, top? What did you do to anger him?”
While she was trying to think how to answer this, the chief bellowed for the shaman, Shakann, to join them. The little gray-bearded man, holding the gourd at the end of a stick to which feathers were tied, came running. Trenn spoke too rapidly for Anana to understand any but a few words. Shakann squatted down by the chief.
Anana considered telling them that they’d entered this world accidentally. But she didn’t know their word for accident. In fact, she doubted there was such. From what she’d learned from Nurgo, these people believed that nothing happened accidentally. Events were caused by the Lord or by witchcraft.
She got an inspiration. At least, she hoped it was. Lying might get her into even worse trouble. Ignorant of the tribe’s theology, she might say something contrary to dogma.
“The Lord was angry with us. He sent us here so that we might lead some deserving tribe, yours, for instance, out of this place. Back to the place where your ancestors lived before they were cast out.”
There was a long silence. The chief looked as if he were entertaining joyful thoughts. The shaman was frowning.
Finally, the chief said, “And just how are we to do this? If the Lord wants us to return to sembart …”
“What is sembart?”
The chief tried to define it. Anana got the idea that sembart could be translated as paradise or the garden of Eden. In any event, a place much preferable to this world.
Well, Earth was no paradise, but, given her choice, she wouldn’t hesitate a second in returning to it.
“If the Lord wants us to return to sembart, then why didn’t he come here and take us to there?”
“Because,” Anana said, “he wanted me to test you. If you were worthy, then I would lead you from this world.”
Trenn spoke so rapidly to Shakann that she could comprehend only half of his speech. The gist, however, was that the tribe had made a bad mistake in not treating the captives as honored guests. Everybody had better jump to straighten out matters.
Shakann, however, cautioned him not to act so swiftly. First, he would ask some questions.
“If you are indeed the Lord’s representative, why didn’t you come to us in his shelbett?”
A shelbett, it turned out, was a thing that flew. In the old days, according to legend; the Lord had traveled through the air in this.
Anana, thinking fast, said, “I only obey the Lord. I dare not ask him why he does or doesn’t do this or that. No doubt, he had his reasons for not giving us a shelbett. One might be that if you had seen us in one, you would have known we were from him. And so you would have treated us well. But the Lord wants to know who is good and who isn’t.”
“But it is not bad to take captives and then kill them or adopt them into the tribe. So how could we know that we were doing a bad thing? All tribes would have treated you the same.”
Anana said, “It’s not how you treated us at first. How you treated us when you found out that we came from the Lord will determine whether you are found good or bad in his eyes.”
Shakann said, “But any tribe that believed your story would honor you and take care of you as if you were a baby. How would you know whether a tribe was doing this because it is good or because it is pretending to be good from fear of you?”
Anana sighed. The shaman was a savage, but he was intelligent.
“The Lord has given me some powers. One of them is the ability to look into the …”
She paused. What was the word for heart?
“To look inside people and see if they are good or bad. To tell when people are lying.”
“Very well,” Shakann said. “If you can indeed tell when a person lies, tell me this. I intend to take this sharp hard thing the chief took from you and split your head open. I will do it very shortly. Am I lying or am I telling the truth?”
The chief protested, but Shakann said, “Wait! This is a matter for me, your priest, to decide. You rule the tribe in some things, but the business of the Lord is my concern.”
Anana tried to appear cool, but she could feel the sweat pouring from her.
Judging from the chief’s expression, she doubted that he would let the shaman have the axe. Also, the shaman must be unsure of himself. He might be a hypocrite, a charlatan, though she did not think so. Preliterate medicine men, witches, sorcerers, whatever their title was, really believed in their religion. Hyprocisy came with civilization. His only doubt was whether or not she did indeed represent the Lord of this wretched cosmos. If she were lying and he allowed her to get away with it, then the Lord might punish him.
He was in as desperate a situation as she. At least, he thought he was.
Was he lying or did he really intend to test her by trying to kill her? He knew that if she were what she said she was, he might be blasted with a bolt from the sky.
She said, “You don’t know yourself whether you’re lying or telling the truth. You haven’t made up your mind yet what you’ll do.”
The shaman smiled. She relaxed somewhat.
“That is right. But that doesn’t mean that you can see what I’m thinking. A very shrewd person could guess that I felt that way. I’ll ask you some more questions.
“For instance, one of the things that makes me think you might be from the Lord is that thing which cut the men and the grewigg in half. With it he could have killed the whole tribe. Why, then, did he throw it away after killing only a few?”
“Because the Lord told him to do so. He was to use the deadly gift of the Lord only to show you that he did not come from this world. But the Lord did not want him to slay an entire tribe. How then could we lead you out of this place to sembart?”
“That is well spoken. You may indeed be what you say. Or you might just be a very clever woman. Tell me, how will you lead us to sembart?”
Anana said, “I didn’t say I will. I said I might. What happens depends upon you and the rest of your tribe. First, you have to cut our bonds and then treat us as vicars of the Lord. However, I will say this. I will guide you to the dwelling palace of the Lord. When we get to it, we’ll enter it and then go through a pass to sembart.”
The shaman raised thick woolly eyebrows. “You know where the Lord’s dwelling is?”
She nodded. “It’s far away. During the journey, you will be tested.”
The chief said, “We saw the dwelling of the Lord once countless light periods ago. We were frightened when we saw it moving along a plain. It was huge and had many … um … things like great sticks … rising from it. It shone with many lights from many stones. We watched it for a wh
ile, then fled, afraid the Lord would be offended and deal harshly with us.”
Shakann said, “What is the purpose of the thing that makes a noise like a gregg’s cry?”
“That will get us into the dwelling of the Lord. By the way, we call his dwelling a palace.”
“Bahdahss?”
“That’s good enough. But the … Horn … belongs to me. You have no right to it. The Lord won’t like your taking it.”
“Here!” the chief said, thrusting it at her.
“You wronged me when you raped me. I do not know whether the Lord will forgive you for that or not.”
The chief spread his hands out in astonishment. “But, I did no wrong! It is the custom for the chief to mount all female captives. All chiefs do it.”
Anana had counted on avenging herself some day. She hadn’t known if she’d be satisfied with castrating him or also blinding him. However, if it was the custom … he really hadn’t thought he was doing anything evil. And if she’d been more objective about it, she would have known that, too.
After all, aside from making her nauseated, he hadn’t hurt her. She’d suffered no psychic damage, and there wasn’t any venereal disease. Nor could he make her pregnant.
“Very well,” she said. “I won’t hold that against you.”
The chief’s expression said, “Why should you?” but he made no comment.
The shaman said, “What about the two men? Are they your husbands? I ask that because some tribes, when they have a shortage of women, allow the women to have more than one husband.”
“No! They are under my command.”
She might as well get the upper hand on the two while she had the chance. Urthona would rave, but he wouldn’t try to usurp her leadership. He wouldn’t want to discredit her, since her story had saved his life.
She held out her hands, and the chief used a flint knife to sever the thongs. She rose and ordered the chief’s mother to be brought to her. Thikka approached haughtily, then turned pale under the dirt when her son explained the situation to her.