Ruori spoke to a page: “Send for the chief prisoner.”
“To hear our judgment on him?” asked DOnoju. “But that should be done formally, in public.”
“Only to talk with us,” said Ruori.
“I do not understand you,” said Tresa. Her tones faltered, unable to carry the intended scorn, but the phrases came out:
“After all you have done, suddenly there is no manhood in you.” He wondered why it should hurt for her to say that. He would
not have cared if she had been anyone else.
Loklann entered between two guards. His hands were bound behind him and dried blood was on his face, but he walked like a conqueror under the pikes. When he reached the dais, he stood with feet braced apart and grinned up at Tresa.
“Well,” he said, “so you find these others less satisfactory and want me back.”
She jumped to her feet and screamed: “Kill him!”
“No!” cried Ruori.
The guardsmen hesitated, their machetes half drawn. Ruori stood up and caught the girl’s wrists. She struggled, spitting like a cat. “Don’t kill him, then,” she agreed at last, so thickly it was
hard to understand. “Not now. Make it slow. Strangle him, burn him alive, toss him on your spears—”
Ruori held fast till she stood quietly.
When he let go, she sat down and wept.
Páwolo DOnoju said in a voice like steel: “I believe I understand. A fit punishment must certainly be devised.”
Loklann spat on the floor. “Of course,” he said. “When you have a man tied up there are any number of dirty little games to play with him.”
“Be still,” said Ruori. “You are not helping your own cause. Or mine.”
He sat down, crossed his legs and laced fingers around one knee and gazed before him, into the darkness at the hail’s end. “I know you have all suffered from this man’s work,” he said, slowly and with care. “You can expect to suffer more from his kinfolk in the future. They are a young race, heedless as children, even as your ancestors and mine were once young. Do you think the Perio was established without hurt and harm? Or, if I remember your history rightly, that the Spaflol people were welcomed here by the Inios? That the Ingliss did not come to N’Zealann with slaughter, and that the Maurai were not once cannibals? In an age of heroes, the hero must have an opponent.
“Your real weapon against the Sky People is not an army, sent up to lose itself in unmapped mountains. . . . Your priests, merchants, artists, craftsmen, manners, fashions, learning—there is the means to bring them to you on their knees, if you will use it!”
Loklann started. “You devil,” he whispered. “Do you actually think to convert us to. . . a woman’s faith and a city’s cage?” He shook back his tawny mane and roared so the walls rang. “No!”
“It will take a century or two,” said Ruori.
Don P~iwolo smiled in his young scanty beard. “A refined revenge, S’flor captain,” he admitted.
“Too refined!” Tresa lifted her face from her hands, gulped after air, held up claw-crooked fingers and brought them down as if into Loklann’s eyes. “Even if it could be done,” she snarled, “even if they did have souls, what do we want with them, or their chil
dren or grandchildren. – . they who murdered our babies today? Before almighty Dlo—I am the last Carabán and I will have my following to speak for me in Meyco’s government—there will never be anything for them but extermination! We can do it, I swear. There would be Tekkans who would help, for plunder. I shall yet live to see your home burning, you swine, and your sons hunted with dogs!”
She turned frantically toward Ruori. “How else can our land be safe? We are ringed in with enemies. We have no choice but to destroy them, or they will destroy us. And we are the last Merikan civilization!”
She sat back and shuddered. Ruori reached over to take her hand. It felt cold. For a bare instant, unconsciously, she returned the pressure, then jerked away.
He sighed in his weariness.