Dalmas, John – Yngling 02 – Homecoming

Neither “centurion” spoke for perhaps a minute. Finally the second one replied. “Many thousands more are scattered through the country northwest of the sea. They have laid waste the country there, butchering the inhabitants and burning the towns.”

“Where do you keep the children?” Anne Marie asked. “All I’ve seen are girls at least ten years old. I haven’t seen any boys at all. Where do you keep them?”

The two faces turned to her, and somehow made that simple act a communication of contempt. “Children are kept separate so that the women may work without hindrance. They live in separate quarters.”

“But who brings them up? Who takes care of them?”

“Those who are assigned.”

She persisted. “When can we visit them?”

“I do not know.”

They were grateful to reach the palace grounds, to be led by a steward to their luxurious quarters.

The upper levels of the palace consisted of numerous segments of terraces, some of them entirely gardens, others with one or more apartments opening onto gardens. Chandra and Anne Marie had a terrace, with its apartment, to themselves. After supper they found their reclining chairs had been moved into the shade of three neatly sheared cedars where they could sit out of the evening sun. A small olive-colored bird sang energetically in a low waxy-leaved tree.

Anne Marie gestured at the chairs. “Moved again. I’m afraid our privacy is fictitious.”

“The price of service, I suppose. At least they’re quiet and inconspicuous.”

“And efficient.”

“The whole outfit is efficient.” With a grunt Chandra lowered himself into one of the chairs. “I don’t know why I ate so much, unless it was to make up for a lousy day.”

“I suppose frustration is part of being an ambassador,” she replied. “And it hasn’t been a total loss. We’re getting a pretty good idea of their technology and the kind of people they are. And a lot of good video footage.”

She walked to the balustrade and looked northward across the city’s roofs. “What kind of games do you suppose they play in that big stadium?”

“The word is arena. A stadium implies athletic contests. I’d be surprised if they didn’t set tigers loose on the slaves over there. I’ve got the feeling they’d feed them babies without blinking.”

“Do you suppose they’re going to let us see the children?” she asked.

“I doubt it. The boy children are probably in barracks somewhere, getting military training. I think the women are slaves and most of the men are soldiers. Mike was right: This city has no walls because it has a big tough professional army. And who but slaves would wear numbers tattooed on their foreheads?”

They both remained silent for awhile.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be so critical of the orcs,” Anne Marie said thoughtfully. “They have to cope with a pretty hard and warlike world. Like those barbarians.”

“Don’t blame the barbarians for the orcs; not that pack of barbarians anyway. The orcs said they’re just arriving, but this city and its culture have been around for awhile.”

He got to his feet. “I think it’s time to call Matt again, and this time I won’t mince words.”

On the Phaeacia, Matthew looked unseeingly at the instrument panel for a long moment after Chandra broke transmission.

“Huh! Whatever those people are, they’ve made a rotten impression on Chan and Anne. What do you make of it?”

“Well,” Nikko answered, “when he said that about ‘feeding them babies,’ I remembered what orcs were. Orcs in ancient literature, that is.”

“Oh? What?”

“An army of subhuman monsters.”

Matthew looked at her, perplexed.

“It was in a fantasy I read when I was about fourteen or fifteen—a trilogy, The Lord Of The Rings. In the story there was an evil sorcerer, a super sorcerer, who’d lived for centuries. Millennia, in fact. And he’d bred an army of sadistic subhuman monsters called orcs, and tried to conquer the world with them. He even had a black tower, like the city down there.”

“Isn’t that a little—improbable? Ancient literature—fantasy literature, anyway—is unlikely to have survived down there. They must have gotten the word from something else. Don’t you think?”

Nikko shrugged. “All the computer had to say about ‘orc’ was, a fish-like marine mammal of Earth. And there are an awful lot of parallels between what’s down there and what’s in the book. What I’m concerned about is the kind of society it would be that tried to emulate the land of Mordor.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *