“What?”
“Can they offer you anything tangible—right now?”
“All were wearing jewels worth more than the
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rewards,” she said. “Some—I’ve never seen anything like them. They’re out of this world!”
Kickaha did not tell her that the cliche was literally true.
He was going to ask her if they had weapons but realized that she would not have recognized them as such if the three did have them. Certainly, the three wouldn’t offer the information to their captors.
“And what of me?” he said, not asking her what the three had offered beyond their jewels.
“You, Kickaha, are beloved of the Lord, or so it is said. Besides, everybody says that you know where the treasures of the earth are hidden. Would a man who is poor have brought back the great emerald of Oshquatsmu?”
Kickaha said, “The pinkfaces will be banging on your doors soon enough. This whole area is going to be unraveled. Where do we go from here?”
Clatatol insisted that he let her blindfold him and then cover him with a hood. In no position to argue, he agreed. She made sure he could not see and then turned him swiftly around a dozen times. After that, he got down on all fours at her order.
There was a creaking sound, stone turning on stone, and she guided him through a passageway so narrow he scraped against both sides. Then he stood and, his hand in hers, stumbled up 150 steps, walked 280 paces down a slight decline, went down a ramp three hundred paces, and walked forty more on a straightway. Clatatol stopped him and removed the hood and blindfold.
He blinked. He was in a round green-and-black striated chamber with a forty foot diameter and a
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three foot wide air shaft above. Flames writhed at the ends of torches in wall fixtures. There were chairs of jade and wood, some chests, piles of cloth bolts and furs, barrels of spices, a barrel of water, a table with dishes, biscuits, meat, stinking cheese, and some sanitation furniture.
Six Tishquetmoac men squatted against the wall. Their glossy black bangs fell over their eyes. Some smoked little cigars. They were armed with daggers, swords, and hatchets.
Three fair-skinned people sat in chairs. One was short, gritty-skinned, large-nosed, and shark-mouthed. The second was a manatee of a man, spilling over the chair in cataracts of fat.
On seeing the third, Kickaha gasped. He said, “Podarge!”
The woman was the most beautiful he had ever seen. But he had seen her before. That is, the face was in his past. But the body did not belong to that face.
“Podarge!” he said again, speaking the debased Mycenaean she and her eagles used. “I didn’t know that Wolff had taken you from your harpy’s body and put you—your brain—in a woman’s body. I …”
He stopped. She was looking at him with an unreadable expression. Perhaps she did not want him to let the others know what had happened. And he, usually silent when the situation asked for it, had been so overcome that . . .
But Podarge had discovered that Wolff was in reality the Jadawin who had originally kidnapped her from the Peloponnese of 3200 years ago and put her brain into the body of a Harpy created in his biolab. She had refused to let him rectify the
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wrong; she hated him so much that she had stayed in her winged bird-legged body and had sworn to get revenge upon him.
What had made her change her mind?
Her voice, however, was not Podarge’s. That, of course, would be the result of the soma transfer.
1 ‘What are you gibbering about, lebtabbiyT’ she said in the speech of the Lords.
Kickaha felt like hitting her in the face. Leblab-biy was the Lords’ perjorative for the human beings who inhabited their universes and over whom they godded it. Leblabbiy had been a small pet animal of the universe in which the Lords had originated. It ate the delicacies which its master offered, but it would also eat excrement at the first chance. And it often went mad.