“To whom?” Hannosa retorted. “To the Sky Lovers their own creed and way of life is all-important. If news of such finds brings in strangers, archeologists, treasure seekers, then they would open the door to what these people came to Janus to escape: contact with other beliefs and customs. That mustn’t happen, they think. As they see it, there is evil inherent in these objects—so they are destroyed.”
“It ain’t right!” Tylos pounded a small fist against the side of the bunk. “It purely ain’t right to smash up stuff like that!”
“Go tell Kosburg that,” one of the other men suggested. “Me—as long as we have to stay outta the fields till the Ceremony, I’m gonna get some rest.” He stretched out on his bunk, setting an example most of the rest were quick to follow.
Tylos went to the window, though what he might be able to see from there Naill did not know. He himself lay flat and closed his eyes. But through his whole body there was a quiver of excitement so intense that he feared everyone in the room could sense it. Had he really done the impossible, kept for himself a fraction of that find? Had luck favored him that far?
When he closed his eyes, he could see vividly again that tube with its patterns, its color. And in his palm he could feel the sleekness of its substance. What was it? For what purpose had it been fashioned? Who had left it there and why? A burial hoard—loot hastily concealed? There were questions he longed to ask those about him concerning the other finds. Dared he try, without revealing to the curious that he knew more about this one than he had admitted?
If he was successful in keeping his find—then was Tylos right? Could a deal be made with some crewman? Only—how could he account for the funds afterward? Well, there would be time, plenty of time, to think that out later. It all depended on how well he had hidden the tube, whether the tree hollow would be safe.
Green and gold, red, blue—even colors he could not put name to, shades melting into one another, whirling, forming this design and that. Naill longed to have it in his grasp again, just to hold and watch for longer than the few moments he had had it after freeing it from the ground. It was beauty in itself—more than beauty: warmth. If he could take it in his two hands, bring it to Malani . . . Naill rolled over on the hard and narrow bunk, his face to the unpeeled bark on the log wall.
“Out!” That was Kosburg’s order as he banged open the door. The tone of that bellow brought instant obedience from his laborers.
Naill followed Hannosa into the open, to discover the entire population of the garth was assembled in the yard. A baby or two cried protestingly in a mother’s arms. Small children stood sober-faced and wondering. Kosburg himself, cap in hand, was at the head of the family line of Believers, facing a man wearing a long gray cloak over the usual dull apparel of the settlers.
The stranger was bareheaded, and his shock of uncovered hair and chest-spread of beard were as gray as his cloak, so it was difficult to see where fabric ended and hair began. Out of that forest of beard a sharp beak of nose stuck, and curiously pale red-rimmed eyes, one of which watered constantly so that those involuntary tears dribbled into the waste of hair below, shone brightly.
“Sinners!” The cracked voice was, in its way, as authoritative as Kosburg’s.
A visible shiver ran along the line of Believers at that accusation.
“The Dark One has chosen to set the snare of his devising on this garth. Dark is only drawn to dark. Your Sky has been clouded.”
A moan came from some of the women and two of the children began to whimper. The cloaked man lifted his head, turned his face to a sky which was indeed cloudier than it had been that morning. He began to chant words unintelligible to Naill, the whole a croaking like the rasp of an ill-set saw.
Still looking skyward, the stranger pivoted his body toward the woodlands. And then, without watching his footing, he marched in heavy strides in that direction. The Believers fell in behind him, men to the fore, and Naill joined the laborers who brought up the rear.
It was only coincidence, of course, but the clouds continued to thicken overhead, the heat of the sun was shut off, and from somewhere a chill breeze had arisen. It wrapped about them as they came into the clearing where lay the treasure cache.
Three times the Speaker marched about the glittering heap on the ground. Then he took up the ax that Lasja had earlier wielded and passed it to Kosburg. The garthmaster reversed the tool, bringing its heavy head rather than cutting blade down on the objects there, battering and breaking them into an undistinguishable mass of crushed material, while the Speaker continued to chant. As Kosburg moved aside, the old man brought from beneath his cloak an old-model blaster.
Now he did look down as he aimed at the broken bits Kosburg had battered into shapelessness. The dazzling beam of the ray shot at that target, and the spectators pushed away from the heat of the blast. When the Speaker was done, there was only blackened earth in a pit. Whatever residue of metal had remained after that fiery attack had seeped into the ground itself. The Speaker turned to Kosburg.
“You will cleanse, you will atone, you will wait.”
The garthmaster nodded his shaggy head. “We will cleanse, we will atone, we will wait.”
They re-formed the procession and passed back across the fields to the homestead.
Tylos was the first to ask of the old hands, “Whatta they gonna do now?”
“One thing,” Brinhold, another of the veteran laborers, told him. “We go to bed with flat bellies tonight. Lasja,” he asked, “why didn’t you just let that mess rot there? Why get the old man started on all this cleansin’ business?”
“Yes!” There was a sullen chorus from his fellows. “Now we’re gonna have to fast while they try to appease the Sky.”
Lasja shrugged. “You know the Rule. Better go hungry a couple of days than have a full lessonin’.”
“He’s right, you know,” Hannosa pointed out. “It’s just our bad luck we found it here. It’s been about two years since Kosburg himself stumbled on that other one.”
Naill looked up. “There was another found here, then?”
“Yes. Kosburg was out hunting his daughter. She was the strange one who used to go running off into the woods whenever she got free of the house. They said she wasn’t right in the head.” Hannosa’s quiet face was shadowed by an expression Naill could not read. “Me, I’d say she was a reversion to what these people might have been before they became Believers. They used to have strange old tales on my world—a legend that there was an earlier race who had fled into the hills, gone into hiding, when invaders took over their land. And now and then the survivors of that earlier people would visit a house in which there was a newborn child and steal it away, leaving one of their own kind in its place.”
“Why?” Naill asked. There was an odd feeling in him, another surge of that queer excitement that had tensed his body when he thought of the hidden tube.
“Who knows? Perhaps the blood was wearing thin and they had to have some of the new breed to mate with their own dying line. Anyway, the changeling—that was the name given to the child who was left—was alien and usually died young. Aillie was like that, unlike the rest of Kosburg’s get—odd enough in her ways to be of a different race.”
“Yeah, she sure was different,” Lasja agreed. “Didn’t have no luck neither.”
“What happened to her?” Naill wanted to know.
“I told you about her—she took the Green Sick and they put her out in the forest like they always do. Only they needn’t have made so big a to-do about her being a sinner! She never did no one no harm—only wanted to go her own way.”
“But that is a sin here. In other places, too. No one must leave the herd—to be different is the complete and damning sin.” Hannosa lay back on his bunk and closed his eyes. “Might as well relax and take it easy, boy. We don’t work and we don’t eat until the period of cleansing is past.”
“How long?”
Hannosa smiled quietly. “That depends on how Kosburg intends to fee the Speaker. Old Hysander has quite a shrewd bargaining sense, and he knows that our worthy master wants to get those western fields cleared before the winter burning. There’ll be some smart trading going on over that little matter just about now.”