After a moment, Mouche was able to raise his head and start back to the corner, trying not to let Papa see he was crying, easy enough since Papa was resolutely keeping his own face turned away. Mouche did not know who he was anymore. It was as if his whole world was coming apart and he with it. And though Papa had said it would pass, it felt more like pain on the way than pain going away. It had an approaching feel to it. Like the whistle of the little train, rising in pitch as it approached, so the pain seemed to intensify toward the end rather than fading.
The packet of gold was waiting Papa in the foyer of Genevois House, counted out by a stern-faced steward, some put into Papa’s hands, some taken into keeping for Mouche. For later. When he was old. He signed a receipt for it in his best hand and put it back in the steward’s hands, then the inner door was opened just wide enough for Mouche to enter.
“Well, come in, boy,” said Madame. “Don’t dawdle.”
And his life as a Hunk began.
2—Ornery Bastable, and a Bit of History
The first of mankind to land on Newholme had been an all-male schismatic group from the skinhead planet, Thor, that had set down on the flatlands east of the River Giles in a stolen ship full of plunder and recently captured slaves. They had started building two towns and had conducted trade in biologicals and furs for more than a decade while they went on building, getting ready, so they told the traders, for the time they would go out and capture themselves some women. All this was a matter of record.
While the two towns were still abuilding, along with fortresses at the center of each, disaster struck. A trading ship, arriving on its usual schedule, found the port abandoned except for rampaging monsters of whom the ship’s crew killed a goodly number. Cursory investigation indicated that the planet was abandoned except for a few surviving slaves who said the settlers had all vanished in the darkness, a few days past.
The trader crew put the slaves aboard the settlers’ ship, and flew it to the nearest COW station, claiming both slaves and ship as salvage even before reporting the disappearance to the Council of Worlds. Questioner I (the predecessor of Questioner II, of whom Mouche’s Papa had spoken, and of whom we will learn more in due time), was sent by the COW to survey the situation. The two settlements were indeed empty, the half-built fortresses held nothing but dust, and though Questioner found no sign of monsters, it felt a definite sense of disquiet about the planet as a whole and said so.
At that stage of history, however, Questioner I was still rather new and had not yet gained the full confidence of the Council of Worlds. Recommendations based on mere “feelings” were almost always ignored because Questioner wasn’t supposed to be able to “feel” anything. The planet was, therefore, listed as vacant by the proper COW committee, which opened it up for another wave of settlers. These were not long in coming. They named the planet Newholme and the two half-built towns Naibah and Sendoph. The fortress in Naibah was called the Fortress of Lost Men, and the one in Sendoph became the Temple, or Panhagion, headquarters for the Hags.
The level and fertile lands along the river were soon claimed, and successive generations of farmers settled farther east, finally moving up among the Ratbacks, an area of crouched and rounded hills that ran to the very foot of the scarp. In these remote valleys the dower rules of the Hags could not be rigorously enforced, and the farm folk acquired a bucolic and obstinate independence. It was not unknown for a cash-poor man, if he was persistent and personable, to talk a woman into coming to his farm to help him pay off her price through time payments to her family.
The Bastable family resulted from exactly this sort of understanding. Harad Bastable was a good worker who inherited a good farm when his older brother died. One of his nearest neighbors had a plethora of daughters, some of whom did not want to marry into the city. Pretty Suldia agreed to wed Harad, and her family agreed to let her do so in return for payments or support to be given them in their age. Suldia soon produced a daughter, Pearla, born at home and registered at the Temple at six months of age, as was required for girls. Three years later, also at home, Suldia bore twins: a son, Oram, and another daughter, Ornalia.