find that tomorrow word will come from the hills that Green has been killed by a wild man of the Clan Axaquexcan, who will demand money before handing the dead slave’s head over. The Duke will accept this as true and will conveniently forget all about searching the ‘rollers.”
Miran rubbed his fat oily palms, while one pale eye glowed. He loved a good intrigue, the more elaborate the better.
But the second day, even though what Green had predicted came true Miran became nervous and began to find the big blond man’s constant presence in his cabin irksome. He wanted to send him down into the hold, but Green firmly refused, reminding the captain of his promise of haven within these very walls. He then calmly appropriated another bottle of the merchant’s Lespaxian, having located its hiding place, and drank it. Miran glowered, and his face twitched with repressed resentment, but he said nothing because of the custom that a guest could do what he pleased—within reasonable limits.
The third day Miran was positively a tub of nerves, jittery, sweating, pacing back and forth. At last he left the cabin, only to begin pacing back and forth on the deck. Green could hear his footsteps for hours. The fourth day he was up at dawn and bellowing orders to his crewmen. A little later Green felt the big vessel move and heard the shouts of the foremen of the towing gangs and the chants of the slaves as they bent their backs hauling at the huge ropes attached to the ‘roller.
Slowly, oh, so slowly it seemed to Green, the craft creaked forward. He dared open a curtain to look out the square port-hole. Before him was the rearing side of another ‘roller, and just for a second it seemed to him that it, not his vessel, was the one that was moving. Then he saw that the ‘roller was advancing at a pace of about fifteen or sixteen feet a minute. It would take them an hour to get past the towering brick walls of the windbreak.
He sweated out that hour and unconsciously fell into his childhood habit of biting his nails, expecting at any time to see the docks suddenly boil with soldiers running after the Bird of Fortune, shouting for it to stop because it had a runaway slave aboard.
But no such thing occurred, and at last the tug gangs stopped and began coiling up their ropes, and Green quit chewing his nails. Miran shouted orders, the first mate repeated them, there was the slap of many feet on the decks above, the sound of many voices chanting. A sound as of a knife cutting cloth told that the sails had been released. Suddenly, the vessel rocked as the wind caught it and a vibration through the floors announced that the big axles were turning, the huge wheels with their tires of chacorotr, a kind of rubber, were revolving. The Bird was on the wing!
Green opened the door slightly and took one last look at the city of Quotz. It was receding rapidly at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, and at this distance it looked like a toy city nestled in the lap of a hillock. Now that the danger from it was gone and the odors too far away to offend his nose it looked quite romantic and enticing.
“And so we say farewell to exotic Quotz,” murmured Green in the approved travelog fashion. “So long, you son of an izzot!”
Then, though he was supposed to stay inside until Miran summoned him, he opened the door and stepped out.
And almost fainted dead away.
“Hello, honey,” said Amra.
Green scarcely heard the children grouped around her also extend their greetings. He was just coming out of the dizziness and blackness that had threatened to overcome him. Perhaps it was the wine coupled with the shock. Perhaps, he was to think later, it was just that he was plain scared, scared as he’d not been in the castle. Ashamed, too, that Amra had found out his plans to desert her, and deeply ashamed because she loved him anyway and would not allow him to go without her. She had a tremendous pride that must have cost her great effort to choke down.
Probably, he was to say to himself later on, it was sheer fear of her tongue that made him quail so. There was nothing that a man dreaded so much as a woman’s tonguelashing, especially if he deserved it. Oh, especially!
That was to come later. At the moment Amra was strangely quiet and meek. All she would say was that she had many business connections and that she knew well Zingaro, the Thieves’ Guild Business Agent. They had been childhood playmates, and they’d helped each other in various shady transactions since. It was only natural that she should hear about the exurotr a slave hiding on the Bird of Fortune had given Zingaro to take back to the Duke. Cornering Zingaro, she had worked out of him enough information to be sure that Green had escaped to the ‘roller. After all, Zingaro was under oath only to be reticent about certain details of the whole matter. From there she had taken the business into her own hands, had told Miran that she would inform the Duchess of Green’s whereabouts unless he permitted her and her family to go along on the voyage.
“Here I am, your faithful and loyal wife,” she said, opening her arms in an expansive gesture.
“I am overwhelmed with emotion,” replied Green, for once not exaggerating.
“Then come and embrace me,” she cried, “and don’t stand there as if you’d seen the dead return from the grave!”
“Before all these people?” he said, half-stunned, looking around at the grinning captain and first mate on the foredeck beside him and at the sailors and their families on the middeck below. The only ones not watching him were the goggled helmsmen, whose backs were turned because they were intent on wrestling with the great spoked wheel.
“Why not?” she retorted. “You’ll be sleeping on the open deck with them, eating with them, breathing their breath, feeling their elbows at every turn, cursing, laughing, fighting, getting drunk, making love, all, all on the open deck. So why not embrace me? Or don’t you want me to be here?”
“The thought never entered my head,” he said, stepping up to her and taking her in his arms. Or, if it had, he reflected, you can bet that I’d not dare say it.
After all, it was good to feel her soft, warm, firmly curved body again and know that there was at least one person on this godforsaken planet that cared for him. What could have made him think for one minute that he could endure life without her?
Well, he had. She just would not, could not, fit into his life if he ever got back on Earth.
11
Miran coughed and said, “You two and your children and maid must get off the deck and go amidships. That is where you will live. Never again must you set foot upon the steering deck unless you are summoned. I run a tight ship and discipline is strictly adhered to.”
Green followed Amra and the children down the steps to the deck below, noticing for the first time that Inzax, the pretty blond slave who took care of the children, was also aboard. You had to give credit to Amra. Wherever she went she traveled in style.
He also thought that if this was a tight ship a loose one must be sheer chaos. Cats and dogs were running here and there, playing with the many infants, or else fighting with each other. Women sat and sewed or hung up washing or dried dishes or nursed babies. Hens clucked defiantly from behind the bars of their coops, scattered everywhere. On the port side there was even a pigpen holding about thirty of the tiny rabbit-eared porcines.
Green followed Amra to a place where an awning had been stretched to make a roof.
“Isn’t this nice?” she said. “It has sides which we can pull down when it rains or when we want privacy, as I suppose we will, you being so funny in some ways.”
“Oh, it’s delightful,” he hastened to assure her. “I see you even have some feather mattresses. And a cookstove.”
He looked around. “But where are the fish tanks? I thought Miran was going to bolt them to the deck?”
“Oh, no, he said that they were too valuable to expose to gunfire if we encountered pirates. So he had the deck cut open wide enough to lower the tanks inside the hold. Then the deck planking was replaced. Most of these people here would be sleeping below if it weren’t for the tanks. But there’s no