After a moment Blade said: 'There is a dwarf by name of Morpho. Do you know him?'
For a long time Baber did not answer. When he did his tone was curt and the friendliness had gone. 'I know of him. I have seen him. What of it?'
It was clear enough that Baber did not wish to speak of the dwarf, yet Blade plunged ahead. 'He is a strange little man. He came to me, when I was first taken, and hinted that he would like me to live. He said he came from Sadda, as perhaps he did, but I think there was something else. I have not seen him since, except for the night I faced the knife, and then he did not know me. I have been wondering if he is friend or enemy, or neither? And if he is Sadda's man, or the Khad's? After hearing you speak I wonder even more.'
The sun dropped out of the sky. From the wall the giant cannon boomed, the muzzle flash a huge blossom of red flame in the sudden darkness. The jade ball keened far over them to splinter itself harmlessly into shards that, and Blade smiled grimly, would be priceless back in H-Dimension.
'We will not speak of the dwarf,' said Baber at last. 'I know of nothing to his credit, nor anything against him. He may even be his own man, a rare thing.'
Blade took the hint and did not mention Morpho again. Presently guards came with their evening meal in wooden bowls. It was still horsemeat and coarse bread and a great tankard of the powerful bross. After drinking it all Blade felt sleepy. He closed his eyes as Baber talked on. Torches had been lit in the stockade, one at each corner, and when the night wind came it tinkled the warning bells along the top of the stockade. As sleepy as he was, Blade noted this, and stored it away for use in the future.
The bross had no effect on Baber, except to keep him wide-awake and talking. Blade drowsed and listened and was not surprised to learn that Baber had once been a great poet among his own people, as well as a warrior. Poets were highly regarded among the Cauca. It accounted for the man's fluency and gift of imagery, which Blade had wondered at, and also for his laughter and sonorous voice, even though - and here Baber's laughter was rueful - it had been many years since he had stroked a jadar, which, Blade judged, was some sort of lyre.
Presently Blade was half between sleep and waking. Baber's voice was a lulling drone in the torch haunted gloom, with the words slurring now and making no distinct sense. Blade posed himself a question.
Would he be glad or unhappy if Lord L were to snatch him back to H-Dimension now. At this moment? Before he had seen this adventure through. He could not really answer himself. At best he was ambivalent. He knew his peril. Death and torture were as real in this dimension as in his own natural one. Yet to seek out, to know, to persevere and above all to conquer, was in his nature as cruelty was in the Mongs. The adventure, the search and solving, beckoned like a lantern on a mountain. Besides, he was an Englishman to whom a task had been entrusted. That it was a shocking and weird and unbelievable task, so fantastic that only five men in the world knew about it, made little difference. It must be done.
Strangely, for Blade was not an intellectual, he found himself thinking of hope. In his mind he capitalized it. HOPE. He had seen the superficial and cynical splendor of the Caths; he understood the mindless cruelty of the Mongs. There was no hope in either.
Yet how often had he thought the same back in H-Dimension, when you only had to read a paper to feel disgust! Blade began to see here what he had not seen there. There was hope! Things did change. Six steps forward and five back left a net total of one step gained.
With a strange sense of personal enrichment, and oddly comforted, Richard Blade fell asleep.
Chapter Nine
A week passed. Blade, the great collar dragging at his neck, worked like the slave he was. He worked in the women's quarters, emptying night soil and scrubbing the pots afterward, and was taunted by dark eyes flashing over veils. Not once did he see Sadda or the dwarf, though once he thought he heard Morpho's voice coming from her quarters.
Rumor had it that the Khad was approaching a new season of madness. Every day the Mongs attacked the wall, sometimes luring the defenders to sally out, sometimes not, but always losing men and retiring in defeat.
When there was no work in the women's quarters Blade was put into the field to labor. He dug latrines and carried great timbers and repaired the high sided wagons, discovering that the Mongs had no clue to using grease on the wheels. No one had thought of it yet. He helped corral and tend the enormous herds of shaggy little horses on which the Mongs depended.
In all this he was guarded like the image of the God, Obi, which sat in a wagon apart. A huge black-painted wagon that only the Khad could enter. Not even Sadda was permitted to gaze on Obi.
In a perverse way Blade enjoyed the work away from the women's quarters. He was free of Aplonius' whip and did not have to struggle to keep from killing the man. For Aplonius whipped him well, many times a day, and always in front of the women.
At night, when he was taken back to the stockade, he and Baber talked. Or rather Baber talked and Blade listened and questioned. And grew wiser and wiser.
As the second week began, and as Blade sat in the dirt eating leavings which Aplonius had thrown him, Sadda left her great tent and approached them. Aplonius, as pomaded and perfumed as ever, brave in his gaily colored clothes, immediately began to fawn. Blade was sickened and, in that moment, could almost feel pity for the man.
Aplonius saw Blade glance at the woman as she drew near and slashed him across the face. 'Eyes down, swine!'
Blade cast his eyes down, but contrived to watch just the same.
Sadda was bare breasted and veiled, as always. Aplonius bowed low and saluted with the whip. 'Good day, my lady Sadda. How lovely you are. You enhance the day. You perfume the air. What can I, who wear your golden collar with gratitude, do for my lady Sadda?'
'You can have him bathed, Aplonius. He stinks! He smells like a corpse left too long uneaten by the carrion apes. Have him well scrubbed - and give him suitable clothes. My women will give them to you.'
She turned and walked away without another word.
When Aplonius turned back to Blade his eyes were swimming with terror and he was wet with sweat. Blade stared at the man and said, 'Your time ends, Aplonius. Mine soon begins.'
Aplonius lashed him in a frenzy, lashed him until he could no longer raise his whip arm. Blade endured it stoically, knowing with a fierce certitude that this was an ending and a beginning.
