would not believe that this small ship would be entering to attack. He took the ship in between the wide gates of the breakwater. He waved at the people in the tower and was surprised to see that most of them were humans. They wore leather helmets and carried shields which he supposed were of wood. They brandished spears — stone- tipped, of course — or held bows and arrows on him. Behind them towered the grey-skinned figures of the Neshgai. Presumably, the giants were the officers.
There was no fire from the towers. They must have thought as he did, that one small ship could not be entering with belligerent intent.
He was not so sure a moment later when he saw a large vessel, a long low galley-type craft, moving swiftly toward him. It was manned with many soldiers, two-thirds of them humans, and it was steered by a rudder. It had no sails. It also had no oarsmen.
His eyes widened then, and he had the sickening feeling that he had just stuck his head into a guillotine. He had seen or heard nothing to indicate that the Neshgai were so advanced technologically.
But when the galley swung around behind them and then came partway alonside to ride herd, it emitted no sound other than the hissing of water cut by the sharp bow and the slap of waves on its side. If the craft held an internal combustion motor, it also had excellent noise-repressing devices.
'What drives that?' he said to Ghlikh.
'I do not know, Lord,' Ghlikh said.
His emphasis ofLord indicated that he believed that Ulysses' day as a god was about over. But he did not seem particularly glad. Perhaps the bat-people were in danger of being enslaved also. Yet, this did not seem likely, since Ghlikh had said that the Dhulhulikh traded with the Neshgai.
He stared at the ship. How to reconcile its advanced method of propulsion with the primitive weapons of its personnel?
He shrugged. He would find out in time. If he did not, he would have more important matters to concern him. Patience had always been a virtue of his, and he had strengthened it enormously since awakening. Perhaps his unimaginably long 'stonehood' had enabled his psyche to absorb some of the endurance of inert and hard matter.
His ship lowered sail, and the oarsmen back-oared to slow the ship down, then raised them as the ship began to slide in alongside the dock to which an officer on the galley had waved them. Humans clad only in kilts took the ropes thrown out by the furry crew and brought the vessel alongside many rubbery-looking bags. The galley slid in a minute later and then reversed its invisible noiseless engines and stopped an inch from ramming into the structure before it.
Ulysses got a close view of the Neshgai then. They stood ten feet or over and had short heavy columnar legs and big feet that splayed out. Their bodies were long — he would guess that they had much back trouble among them — and their arms were thickly muscled. Their hands had four fingers each.
The heads were much like the carved head he had seen in the Vroomaw village. Their ears were enormous, but much smaller in proportion to the head than an elephant's. The forehead was very broad and knobbed at the temples. They had no eyebrows, but their eyelashes were very long. The eyes were brown, green or blue. The skinny wrinkled proboscis, when dangling, fell to their chests. The mouths were wide and had everted lips — almost negroid lips, in fact. Two tiny tusks protruded at right angles to the plane of the face. Their mouths contained only four molars, and this, of course, would affect their speech. Their Ayrata, the trade language, would have a mushy sound. It was so indistinct that it was almost a new language. But after the ear was tuned to it, the language became intelligible. However, the humans had difficulty reproducing Neshgai sounds and so their Ayrata was a compromise between that which other well-toothed peoples spoke and that which the Neshgai spoke. Fortunately, the Neshgai could understand the particular Ayrata of their slaves.
Their skins were varied from a very light grey to a brownish-grey.
They wore peaked leather helmets with four flaps, much like Sherlock Holmes' deerstalker cap, Ulysses thought. They wore enormous beads, stones of various sorts strung on leather cords, around their thick necks. Heavy breastplates of bone painted in red, black and green covered their relatively narrow chests. Their only clothing — universal among humans and Neshgai alike — was a kilt. The officers' legs were bound in green puttees, and their enormous feet were shod in sandals. Some wore cloaks of a heavy cloth with great white feathers sticking out of the hems.
To Ulysses, these creatures combined a somewhat repulsive alienness with an aura of power and wisdom. This last resulted from his own attitude toward elephants, of course. Then he reminded himself that the Neshgai might be descended from probiscidea but they were not elephants, any more than he was just an ape. And though their giant size and doubtless great strength gave them advantages, they would also give them certain disadvantages. There was a debit side to everything.
A magnificent Neshgai stood apart and ahead of the others on the dock. It was he who spoke to Ulysses while everybody else listened respectfully. He trumpeted shrilly through the long nose — a salutation, as Ulysses would learn — and then delivered a short speech. Though he knew it was in Ayrata, Ulysses could understand little of it because of the strange sounds. He asked Ghlikh to translate, warning him not to lie.
'And what will you do to me, Lord?' Ghlikh said, looking sidewise at him with undisguised hate.
'I may kill you here and now,' Ulysses said. 'Do not start gloating yet.'
Ghlikh snarled wordlessly at him and then repeated in more intelligible Ayrata what the official, Gooshgoozh, had said.
The sum of it was that Ulysses should surrender himself and his furry crew to Gooshgoozh. He would be conducted into the city, into the main administration building itself, the home of the ruler and of his chief aid, Shegnif. There he would be interviewed by Shegnif. Unless Ulysses agreed to surrender at once, Gooshgoozh would order his forces to attack them.
'This is the capital?' Ulysses said, waving his hand at the city on the hill. It was the largest habitation he had seen so far, but even so, it could not hold more than thirty thousand, including the humans.
'No,' Ghlikh said. 'Bruuzhgish is many miles to the east. It is there that the Hand of Nesh and his aid, Shegnif, live.'
Ghlikh used a word to indicate Shegnifs position which could be translated as Grand Vizier.
Gooshgoozh spoke again, and Ghlikh said that they must leave the ship and march up the hill to the garrison. There they would all be provided with transportation to the capital. Apparently, he was not worried about the weapons which the party carried.
Ulysses left first to stand beside the towering Gooshgoozh. The giant exuded an odour more like a sweating horse than an elephant. Ulysses found it rather pleasant. The Neshgai's stomach was, however, rumbling, a phenomenon that was to surround Ulysses in this land. Moreover, the Neshgai began to chew on a big stick made of pressed vegetables and chewed as he gave more orders to his soldiers. The Neshgai spent much time eating because of the demands of their big stomachs. But not as much time as an elephant would.
Finally organised, the cavalcade marched up a street which ran straight up the hill. The Neshgai soldiers, human slaves and nonhuman officers, followed the line of newcomers. Wulka carried Khyuks on his back. Ulysses, carrying Ghlikh, followed the enormous Gooshgoozh. He walked very dignifiedly, and very slowly, up the hill. By the time they reached the top, he was panting, and saliva was running out of his mouth. Ulysses remembered a comment by Ghlikh that the Neshgai were prone to heart disease, lung and back trouble, and distress of the feet and legs. They paid for the combination of great size with a bipedal structure.
The street was paved with bricks set in mortar and was about fifty feet wide. The houses were square, had triple domes, and were covered with many figures and geometric designs and painted in a manner that was called 'psychedelic' in Ulysses' time. There were no citizens or slaves in the street because the soldiers cleared them out. But many grey or tanned faces looked out of the windows and doors at them as they passed. According to Ghlikh, the Neshgai had never seen the furry feline beings before.
Gooshgoozh left them standing outside the garrison fort, which was a castle-like structure built of cyclopean blocks of granite. An hour passed and then another hour. It was just like being in the army, Ulysses thought. Hurry and wait, hurry and wait. Ten million years had made a new genus of sentient but had made no difference in military procedure.
Awina had been shifting back and forth from one foot to the other, but she finally came up to Ulysses and leaned against him.
She said, 'I am afraid, my Lord. We have put ourselves into the hands of the long-nosed men, and whatever
