himself up and looked at the free runners, his face majestic, grim. 'And these are the words of the Master. All who are not with us are against us.'
Duwan the Elder seized upon that thought. He had been told that there were hundreds of male runners, and that number would partially replace the losses to the army.
'We will waste no time on those who equivocate,' he said, 'but we will shove them aside, treating them as we would treat the enemy, lest they stand in our way or betray us to the enemy.'
'The choice is yours, Farnee my father,' Tambol said. 'Join us, accept the ways of Du, live a good live eating and drinking of the bounty of Du, or risk our wrath. The sight of you reminds us of what we were before the Master taught us to be Drinkers, and that we cannot abide.' Farnee looked around nervously at the bared blades of the swordsmen.
'What would you have us do?'
'Eat,' Tambol said. 'Fatten yourselves, and then you will be assigned to a unit for training.'
Farnee swallowed and then said, 'Can we not simply leave you, go farther to the west where we will not offend you?'
Duwan the Elder motioned with his hand and the swordsmen moved closer to the group of runners. 'You are with us or against us,' he said, borrowing Tambol's words. 'Eat.'
Farnee was handed leaf organs from an evergreen. He glanced around, in panic. Seeing no other course, he ate. In the days that followed it became a challenge not to get the free runners to eat, but to keep them from stripping all green in the immediate area.
Runner males began training. The surviving wood workers began to replace lost bows and arrows, and, in the absence of metal, experiments were made in accordance with ancient legends of the making of arrowheads from stone.
'It is time for me to go,' Tambol told Duwan the Elder, on a day when the first severe storm of winter threatened, when the sky to the northwest was purple-black and Du's rays seemed to be already weakened. 'I will try to outpace the winter to the east.'
Winter overtook him, however, and he walked through snows and winds and when, at last, he reached a settlement he was weakened, looking very much the part of a wandering priest of Tseeb. He was given shelter in the pongpen and began, that first night, to talk of the Master. Winter had come to Arutan. The conscripts among those who had served in the conqforce were sent back to their homes. All was quiet in the pongpens. Elnice had ordered a few random peelings, with questioning, to determine if word of the abortive slave rebellion in the north had reached the pongs of the capital city and she was pleased to hear no hint of it from the screaming, begging victims. She had ordered a quarantine of the city of Kooh. It was enforced by a large force of her guards. No citizen or pong was allowed to leave Kooh to travel to the south.
As the cold closed in and made her luxurious quarters seem even more cozy, Elnice consulted her wise men with Captain Hata present. The eldest of her advisers was speaking. 'It is my opinion, High Mistress, that there is no present danger. The future? That is another matter. It took our ancestors three generations to wipe from the memory of the relatively few native survivors of the conquest the knowledge of the special abilities of these people. Now that knowledge is once more afoot. We know that there are escaped slaves in the west. Your own people say that many escaped death in your last battle in the north. We can be assured that those who escaped will continue to spread the word, and that, High Mistress, is the danger.'
'I see no danger,' Hata said. 'A few pongs were deluded by a rabble-rouser. He is now dead.'
'Do you read the priestly writing, Captain Hata?' the old adviser asked. Hata shook his head. 'Perhaps you should have read to you the records of those who came to these lands first. It is not widely known that our ancestors narrowly escaped being pushed back to the south, in bloody defeat, by peoples who, until our arrival, knew nothing of weapons or killing. Tell me, did the pongs fight well? Did you not have losses?' Hata made a gesture of dismissal, but Elnice said, 'Their losses were greater, but the bones of our dead litter a canyon in the north. And one of them fought better than any warrior I've ever seen.'
'So it was in history. Once they learned, they fought savagely. And,' he squinted and looked around with a wry smile, 'this will ruffle the pride of many, but it should be said. Warrior for warrior, equally armed and equally trained, they were superior, those early people who called themselves Drinkers.'
Hata started to protest.
'Captain,' the old adviser said, 'can you march for one change of the moon without rations? Can you live, in winter, on dry leaves and grass?
Can you expose your skin to the sun and use its light to make energy? They can. Another thing. Have you seen figures showing the total population of pongs in our cities, in our settlements, in the single establishments in the countryside? We have, to sustain our lifestyle, allowed our slaves to outbreed us, to actually outnumber us.'
'There is a simple solution for that,' Hata said. 'Kill them all.' The old adviser spread his hands. 'Are you willing, captain, to cook your own food, to carry your own wood, to clean your own house? Are you willing to take your turn in the mines, in the fields, in the workshops? Our entire way of life is based on our slaves, captain. To eliminate them would require vast upheaval.'
