What he did know was that the Xurdimur was a thing that shouldn’t be. Yet, the very presence of men here was just as amazing, just as preposterous. Homo sapiens was scattered throughout the Galaxy. Everywhere that the space-traveling Earthmen had gone, they had found that about every fourth inhabitable planet was populated by men of their species. The proof lay not just in the outward physical resemblance of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial; it lay in their ability to breed. Earthman, Sirian, Albirean, Vegan, it made no difference. Their men could have children by the women of other planets.
Naturally there had been many theories to account for this fact. All had as a common basis the assumption that Homo sapiens had sometime, somewhere, in the very remote past, originated on one planet and then had spread out over the Galaxy from it. And, somehow, space travel had been lost and each race had gone back to savagery, only to begin again the long hard struggle toward civilization and the re-discovery of spaceships. Why, no one knew. One could only guess.
There was the problem of language. It might seem that if man had come from a common birthplace he would at least have kept a trace of his home language and that the linguists could break down the development of tongue and link one planet to another through it. But no. Every world had its own Tower of Babel, its own ten thousand languages. The terrestrial scientist might trace Russian and English and Swedish, and Lithuanian and Persian and Hindustani back to a proto-Indo-European, but he had never found on any other planet a language which he could say had also derived from the Aryan Ursprache.
Green’s mind wandered to the two Earthmen now imprisoned in the city of Estorya. He hoped they weren’t being treated badly. They could be in horrible pain at this very moment, if the priests felt like subjecting them to a little demon-testing.
Thinking of torture led him to sit up a little straighter and to stretch his arms and legs. In an hour he was supposed to meet the Duchess. To do that he had to go through the supposedly secret door in the wall of the turret at the northern end of the walk, up a stairway through a passage between the walls, and so to the Duchess’s apartments. There one of the maids-of-honor would usher him into Zuni’s presence and then would try to eavesdrop so she could report to the Duke later on. Zuni and Green weren’t supposed to know about this, but were to pretend that she was their trusted confidante.
When the great bell of the Temple of the God of Time, Grooza, struck, Green would rise from his bench and go to what he now thought of as a wearisome chore. If that woman could only be interested in talking of something else besides her complexion or digestion, or idle palace gossip, it wouldn’t be so bad. But no, she chattered on and on, and Green would get increasingly sleepy, yet would not dare drop off for fear of irreparably offending her. And to do that....
7
The lesser moon had touched the western horizon and the greater was nearing the zenith when Green awoke and jumped to his feet, swearing in sheer terror. He’d fallen asleep and kept Zuni waiting.
“My God, what’ll she say?” he said aloud. “What’ll I tell her?”
“You needn’t tell me anything,” came her angry retort from very close by. He started, and whirled around and saw that she’d been standing behind him. She was wrapped in a robe, but her pale face gleamed from beneath the overhanging hood and her mouth was opened. White teeth flashed as she began accusing him of not loving her, of being bored by her, of loving some other woman, probably a slave girl, a good-for-nothing, lazy, brainless, emptily pretty wench. If his situation hadn’t been so serious Green would have smiled at her self-portrayal.
He tried to dam the flood, but to no avail. She screeched at him to shut up, and when he put his fingers to his lips and said, “Shhh!” she replied by raising her voice even more.
“You know you’re not supposed to be out of your rooms after dark unless the Duke is along,” he said, taking her elbow and attempting to steer her down the walk toward the secret door. “If the guards see you there’ll be trouble, bad trouble. Let’s go.”
Unfortunately the guards did see them. Torches appeared at the foot of the steps below the walk, and iron helmets and cuirasses gleamed. Green tried to urge her on faster, for there was still time to make it to the door. She jerked her arm loose and shouted, “Take your filthy hands off me, you Northern slave! The Duchess of Tropat doesn’t allow herself to be pushed around by a blond beast!”
“Damn it,” he snarled, and he shoved her. “You stupid kizmaiaz! Get going! You won’t be tortured if they find us together!”
Zuni jerked away. Her face twisted and her mouth worked soundlessly. “Kizmaiaz!” she finally gasped. “Kizmaiaz yourself!”
Suddenly she began screaming. Before he could clamp his hand over her mouth, she dashed past him and toward the steps. It was then that he came out of his paralysis and ran, not after her, which he knew was useless, but toward the secret door. All was up. It was absolutely no use trying to explain to the guards. The situation had now entered a conventional phase. She would tell the guards that he had come into her room, through some unknown means—which would be “found out” later—and had dragged her out onto the walk, apparently with the intention of violating her. Why he should pick a public place when he already had the privacy of her rooms would not be asked. And the guards, though they would know what really had happened, would pretend to believe her and would furiously seize him and drag him off to the dungeons. The absurd thing about it was that within a few days the whole city, including Zuni herself, would believe that her story was true. By the time he’d been executed they would hate his guts, and the lot of all the slaves would be miserable for a while because they would share his blame.
Green had no intention of being seized. Flight was an admission of guilt, but it made no difference now.
He ran through the secret door, shut and bolted it and raced up the steps that led to her apartments. The guards would have to take the long way around; he had at least two minutes before they could unlock the two doors of the ante-rooms to her quarters, explain to the guards just outside them what had happened and begin a search for him. As for him, he was running like a rabbit, but he was thinking like a fox. Having known that just such a situation might arise, he had long ago planned in detail several possible courses of action. Now, he chose the likeliest one and began acting efficiently—if not smoothly.
The staircase was a narrow corkscrew with room for only one person at a time to go up. He ran up it so fast that he got dizzy with the ever-winding turns. He reeled and had trouble keeping from falling to his left when he did arrive at its top. Nevertheless he did not pause to catch breath or balance but pulled the lever that would make the door swing out. He burst through it. No one there, thank God. He stopped for a moment, listened to make sure nobody was in the next room, then pushed on a boss set in a pattern of bronze protuberances, which was connected with the mechanism that operated the secret door. The section of wall swung back silently until it was flush with the rest, and quite indistinguishable. He then twisted the knob so the door couldn’t be opened from the other side. Green took time to give fervent thanks to the builders of the castle, who had prepared this device for the owners to hide within in case of a successful invasion or revolt. If it had not been there he could not have escaped.
Escaped? He’d only put off his inevitable capture. But he intended to run as long as he could and then fight until they were forced to kill him.
The first thing to do was to find a weapon. As a matter of fact, he was so familiar with Zuni’s rooms that he knew exactly where he could get what he wanted. He walked through two large rooms, making his way easily even through the feeble duskish light that the few oil lamps and candles furnished. Hanging from the wall of the third room was a saber made of the best steel obtainable on this planet and fashioned by the greatest smiths, the swordwrights of faraway and almost legendary Talamasko. The blade was a gift from Zuni’s father on the occasion of her wedding to the Duke. It was supposed to be given by Zuni to her eldest son when he came of weapon-carrying age. The hilt had a guard on which was inscribed in gold the motto: Sooner hell than dishonor.