Doomstar

Chai roused up from the trade booth's shadow and followed him.

The avenue of trees glowed in the sunlight like huge fantastic torches, white flowers massed against the red leaves. The trodden way underfoot was dusty-warm, fragrant with crushed grasses. It seemed perfectly natural that he should meet Nillaine coming toward him from the village.

'Johnny!' she cried. 'I was just on my way to see you.' She wore a length of peacock blue silky stuff, a present from him, draped around her, and there were flowers in her strange bright hair. 'Is the trading finished?'

'Not yet,' he said. 'I wanted time to roam a little. It's a long while since I've been here.'

Her amber eyes smiled at him. 'I'll roam with you.' Then she saw Chai, gray and huge in the tree shadows. 'Oh Johnny, send it back, please. It frightens me.'

Kettrick shrugged and spoke to Chai briefly in her own tongue. She turned obediently and went back toward the ship. Nillaine's shoulders lifted in a little shudder of relief.

'Such a great, fierce, sad creature. I cannot laugh when it's around.' She took his hand. 'Where shall we go?'

'Where it pleases you. After I speak with your father.'

'Oh, I'm sorry, Johnny. My father has gone to the Third-Bend Village.' She was referring to one on the third bend of the river, north. 'He will be back before sunset. Speak to him then.'

'Well,' said Kettrick, 'in that case, I have no choice.' But he was irritated, as though Whellan had done this deliberately to avoid him. Which was foolish, of course. Whellan could not possibly have known that he would come.

They walked down the avenue of trees and Nillaine held to his hand just as she had used to, and he matched his stride to her little sandaled feet.

The village was quiet in the warm noon. There were smells of cooking. A few children played. The door of the Tall House stood open and there was nothing inside but shadow. Kettrick and Nillaine crossed the green. There was a wide dusty lane beyond. It went between meandering rows of the small thatched houses, leading eventually and without haste to a tract of semijungle and then, much farther on, to another village.

The houses seemed to Kettrick to be unusually still this day, as though many of the people were gone, or were sitting inside waiting for something. He tried to explain it by saying to himself that they were all out by the ship. Only he knew this was not so. The villagers had already done their trading, and the people around Grellah now were almost all from the more distant places.

Nillaine chattered happily. About Kettrick. About Earth, about Tananaru, about what he did there and what he was going to do.

'What will you do, Johnny?'

'What I've always done. Trade.'

'But suppose they find out. The I–C. Surely you can't trust everyone as you do us, surely someone will tell them you've come back.'

He laughed and did not answer.

'Suppose you meet Seri,' she said. 'You almost did. Will he not tell?'

'Don't you worry about it,' Kettrick said, and turned aside from the main track into a narrower one. Trees pressed closer on either side, making deep shadows shot with glancing copper light that moved with the movement of the branches. Very quickly the path began to climb, toward a line of hills that thrust above the jungle.

Nillaine let go of his hand and walked a while in silence, a bright blue butterfly dancing down the shadow tunnel ahead of him.

'Seri won't tell,' Kettrick said. 'He's my friend, you know that.'

'Oh, yes.'

'I won't tell on him, either.'

She paused, ever so slightly. 'About what?'

'About what he does here.'

Nillaine stopped and turned, standing beside a crimson-flowered vine that was slowly and beautifully strangling a tree.

She said blandly, 'But Johnny, he trades. Like you.'

'Not like me. Or there would have been nothing left for me.'

She laughed. 'That's true.'

'What is it, then? Narcotics? Pretty little girls who want to see faraway worlds?'

She came close to him, her amber eyes alight. 'I'm not supposed to tell.'

'Oh. And what do I have to do to make you?'

'I'm greedy.' She bent her head to one side and stretched out her arms. 'I want to glitter and shine, and make music when I walk.'

'I will deck you,' said Kettrick, 'as no other woman was ever decked before. I will make every girl in every village hate you.'

She laughed again. 'I will love that!' She caught his hand, all mischievous child again. 'Come on, then. I'll show you. But you have to promise not to tell my father.'

He promised, and they went on to a place where the path forked. Here Nillaine turned aside, leading the way into a narrow gorge that presently offered no path at all but the water-worn rock that floored it. The gorge climbed steeply, and widened, and then they were clambering up a broad slope with the forest thinning on it and the top of the jungle solid as a floor below them.

The sun struck hot at their shoulders, and a wind blew. Once or twice Kettrick thought he saw movement among the trees, and twice or more he thought he heard a sound, as though more than they two were on that slope. But he could not be sure.

They came at length to a high place held privately in a cup of the hills. It was very still there, walled with forest and the higher peaks on three sides so that even the wind was cut off. The floor of the cup had been made level, and paved with many-colored stones set in a kind of mosaic that seemed to have no pattern, and yet Kettrick knew there was one. Dotted about this level floor, apparently at random, were tall slim carvings of wood set upright.

Kettrick stopped at the edge of the floor.

'Why have you brought me here?' he asked.

Nillaine turned and looked at him, standing by one of the tall pillars. 'You know where you are?'

'This is the Woman Place, isn't it?'

She said, 'Yes,' and leaned against the pillar. The pillar had arms and hands. These held a sheaf of grain between two swelling breasts.

He moved carefully back from the colored stones. 'Why, Nillaine?'

'You'll have one chance, Johnny. We could not do less.'

'The chance Whellan started to give me on the first night?'

Her bright head bobbed against the pillar. The wood was polished and very dark. 'Whellan's a man, and trusting. He didn't realize that you were lying.'

'Lying?'

'About coming back to trade. Just now I gave you a chance to tell me the truth, but you lied again.' She smiled. 'We know a little of the law here, we know something of how it is done.'

'Very well,' said Kettric. 'Suppose I did lie. How could it concern you?'

'We love you, Johnny. We want you to live.' The sun shone on the polished wooden breasts above her head. The fingers of the carven hands held the sheaf of grain with infinite tenderness. 'Stay here with us a while. You'll be quite safe. And after it's over, you'll be free.'

Kettrick said slowly, 'After what is over?' And his tongue was dry in his mouth.

Angrily she cried out, 'I'm grown now, I'm a woman, not a child! Don't treat me as one, because I'm smaller than you! You know. You must know. You followed Seri. You wanted me to show you what he did here. He warned us that someone might follow, he told us that men were trying to stop what is to come. Another man we would have killed outright, but you…'

The sun was hot on Kettrick's back. He could feel the sweat run, and wondering how it could be so cold on his hot skin. He shook his head and said,