They had not found the tube; Naill hugged that thought to him as he lay through the hours of early evening. He had not seen it in that pile of objects destroyed. How soon dared he return to take it out of hiding? Good sense dictated a long wait for that. And yet his hands itched and twitched; he had a hunger for it as sharp as his hunger of body. Far back in his mind a small wonder stirred at this preoccupation with the alien artifact—why did it pull him so? Did it represent his chance of freedom, always providing he was able to get it to the port and make a deal with it? Or was it for itself that he wanted it so? And his wonder was tinged with a cat leap of fear.
Somehow Naill fought down that strong pull. He was physically tired, yet his mind was not lulled into any drowsiness. Instead he thought intently of small things—the leaves of the trees, the depths of the forest past the scars of the clearing, the aromatic smells, the way the wind lifted and rippled branch and bush.
He must have been asleep, for, when his eyes opened once again, it was dark. Naill stared into that dark. Overhead was the top bunk. He could hear the creak of wood, a sigh, a mumble where one of his roommates stirred unhappily. He was here, in Kosburg’s garth—on a holding ripped out of Janus’s forest covering by human will, hands, and stubborn determination.
But where had he been? Someplace else—someplace—right. Startled, Naill turned that impression over in his mind, tried to understand meaning through emotion. He had been elsewhere . . . that place had been right. He was here now—and it was wrong, wrong as a piece of machinery someone was trying to fit into a place where it did not belong, to do a job it could not manage.
It was hot. He was shut in, boxed, trapped. Naill moved softly, with sly pauses to listen, as an animal deep in the territory of a natural enemy might move. He wanted out—into the dark cool of the open. Then across the fields—to his tree—to what lay hidden there. His hands were shaking so much that he pressed them tight against his chest, and under them his heart beat wildly. Out—free—in the night!
His caution held until he was past the door of the bunkhouse. Then that wild exultation swept through him completely and he ran, seeming to skim across the rough surface of the field as if he were being drawn along by a tie uniting him to the waiting tree hollow. Dark here, but not the same kind of dark that had held back in the bunkhouse. Again that small part of his brain which could still wonder, was still unabsorbed by the desire that heated the rest of him, noted that he could see in this dark, that only the hearts of the deepest shadows were veiled to him.
And as he pushed into the roughly cleared land where they had been working, the wind wrapped around him softly, welcomingly. The leaves were not just set rustling by its fingers now; they sang—sang! And Naill wanted to sing, too. Only a last dying spark of caution choked that mutely in his throat.
Stench of burning . . . He skirted the spot where the Speaker had used the blaster, not realizing that his lips were set in a snarl, that his eyes blazed, that he tasted anger, an anger out of all proportion to what had happened there only a few hours ago. Then he was through the veil of bushes, reaching up. His fingers on bark, smooth, welcoming bark . . .
Why welcoming? asked the now almost quiescent questioner in him, the questioner that vanished as his fingers passed from bark to tube. Naill held that out and gave a cry of pure delight. Color—swimming color—shades combining, dancing—color from elsewhere, from the place where he was meant to be. A key . . . for the gate he must find—his own!
“Well, so that’s it, boy. You did it—just like I kinda thought you did all along.”
Naill spun around in a half crouch, the tube cupped in a hand tight against him. Tylos! Tylos standing there, grinning.
“Held out on ’em, Renfro? That was a right smart trick. Gonna pay off too—pay off for both of us.”
“No!” Naill was only partly out of the spell that had held him since his awakening in the bunkhouse. The only decision he was certain of was that Tylos had no part, and would never have any part, of the thing he held.
“Now, you ain’t gonna push me out, Renfro. All I gotta do is yell out nice and clear and you won’t have no treasure left. You saw what they did to the rest of that today, didn’t you?”
“If I don’t have it, then you don’t either.” A portion of reasoning returned to Naill.
“True enough. Only I ain’t gonna let you walk off with it neither. The boys back there, they said as how this is the second cache of this stuff found around here. Could be three, you know. And Sim Tylos, he’s never been pushed outta no deal yet—not never by any Dipple creeper, he ain’t. Give us a look.”
The bole of the tree was hard at Naill’s back. “No!”
“No?” Tylos’s voice still held to the pitch of ordinary conversation, but his hand moved. The light of the blue-green Janusan moon picked up the sheen of the knife blade, point up and out. “These here garthmen, they don’t hold with blood-lettin’—not out and open—or so the boys say. Only I ain’t no Believer—nor you neither. You give me that!” The knife sliced air. Tylos, armed with naked metal, avid for what Naill held, was not the same scrounging, sly, work-dodging weakling he had been.
“So!” Shadows out of shadow: Kosburg, his son, two more of his kinsmen, coming in a hunter’s circle. “So—the evil still is—the sinning is yet! Well that we watched this night. Andon, you take the small one.”
A loop of rope snapped out to pin Tylos’s arms to his side, effectively halting before it began any struggle he might have made.
Kosburg regarded the small laborer. “He has not touched it. Intent but not yet the full sin. Put him in keeping. He shall be lessoned—well.”
Another vicious jerk took Tylos off his feet, brought a hardly coherent stream of pleas and attempted self-justification out of him, until a kick from Andon impressed upon him the wisdom of silence.
“You—” Kosburg had turned to face Naill. “You are the complete sinner, infidel! You found—you concealed. You brought down upon us Sky wrath!”
His hand shot out and up with a speed Naill had not realized him capable of, and the club he held struck numbingly on Naill’s forearm with force enough to bring a choked scream out of the younger man and throw him to his knees. Yet, in spite of his pain, he watched the tube, free of his grasp, roll to the open and lie there, warm, beautiful, glowing, in the moonlight. Only for an instant was it so. Then Kosburg leaped upon it, stamping with his heavy boots, grinding it into a powder that could not be told from the silvery wood dust—all that warmth and life.
Naill cried out, threw himself at the dancing hulk of the man treading in a frenzied shuffle up and down in the mass of withered leaves and churned earth. He did not see the blow that laid him limp and helpless a moment later.
Dark again, pain in his head and dark—a musty dark, the very taste of which made a sickness come into his throat. Dark . . . Why should a fire be dark? And surely he lay in the heart of a fire from which he could not escape. The fire was in him, outside him—filled the world.
There was a long time when he awoke to the dark and the fire, to moan for water, to roll across an earth floor, tearing at his already tattered clothing, then to lapse once more into that other place, which he could never remember but which was so much more important than the dark and the fire.
Light struck in. It seared his eyes and made him cower and hold his hands before his face. He shrank away from the light, which mixed with the pain in his head and the fire that consumed him. But the light filled the world—there was no place to hide or shelter from it.
“Look at him!” Revulsion, fear—those emotions reached him even in that place where he crouched trembling.
“Green Sick! Get him out of here—he has the Green Sick!”
Then the harsh croak of another voice. “The sinner is condemned by the Sky. Let him be dealt with after the custom, garthmaster.”