Empire of Walfarg who had driven through here from the eastern seaboard in the old days and taken their suzerainty of all the Hostile Territories.
The debate I carried out did not last long. Of a certainty I could travel far faster along the road with its squared slabs than across the arid plain. Those stones were still in remarkable condition, squared, their edges only slightly crumbled and the greenery that attempted to struggle through the interstices could subsist only on drifted soil, for the old engineers of Loh had built well. But on the road I would be marked.
So, keeping the road generally in sight, I traveled more safely if more slowly parallel to it, heading east. On the eighth day I began to discern a jagged appearance to the eastern horizon. The skyline there did not bear the kind of outline I associated with a mountain range, and I hoped there was going to be nothing like The Stratemsk ahead of me. I did not relish that thought. We had flown through The Stratemsk, Delia and Seg and Thelda and I. That mountain chain lofted so high, extended so sprawlingly vast, that it defied all rational comprehension. It walled off with chilling finality the western end of the Hostile Territories from the eastern end of the lands on the eastern border of the inner sea. What happened there, in the Eye of the World, might have been happening back on my Earth for all that the people of the Hostile Territories knew. And, now, I began to entertain the deepest suspicions that another and equally hostile barrier existed between the Hostile Territories and the eastern seaboard of this continent of Turismond.
If it did, I would have to pass through, somehow, so as to reach the coast, take ship to Vallia, and reach my Delia of the Blue Mountains.
The terrain continued unpleasant, much cut up with dry gulches and razor-backed outcroppings of naked rock. Here — although I knew I must have trended well north of the parallel of latitude on which stood Pattelonia, the city of the eastern seaboard of the Eye of the World from which we had set out — the weather continued hot with the brazen Suns of Scorpio burning down. I had now to hunt my food and drink in earnest.
The jagged impression of the skyline before me continued when I was able to observe it from a higher-than- usual eminence, although the difficulty of the ground with its bare-bones, desiccated look meant I was more often than not confined between rocky walls. My back kept up an infernal itch and my head swiveled from side to side, constantly observing my back trail, like — if you will pardon the anachronistic image — the rear turret of a Lancaster. The only life that scraped a subsistence here larger than the insects and lizards and other burrowing animals seemed, from all that I observed, to be a kind of six-legged opossum and the wheeling birds, both of which fed on the life lower down the food-chain. You may easily understand how relieved I was that from day to day the birds that followed me were no larger in size than an Earthly vulture or kite. Why they were following me was obvious; but I had to reach my Delia of Delphond, and was in no mood to provide a meal for these scavengers of the air. Harsh vegetation grew scrawnily along shadowed cracks in the uptilted rock faces. There were ants here, too, and I avoided their dwellings with great circumspection. So it was that a quick and furtive movement beyond a boulder at the far end of a draw sent me at once to cover.
I waited.
Patience is not merely the virtue of the hunter — it is his life. Presently a Chulik stepped out into the center of the draw.
I drew my breath in a gasp of amazement.
The Chuliks I had seen on Kregen before were full-fleshed men, with two arms and two legs, with a healthy, oily yellow skin. They habitually shaved their skulls with the exception of a long rope of hair that might grow to reach their waists. From the corners of their lips protruded two upward thrusting tusks a full three inches in length and, although they were human-seeming, they knew little of humanity. Normally they were highly prized as mercenaries and guards commanding higher prices than the Ochs or the Rapas, beast-men who performed similar functions. Some I had seen as slaves, not many. This Chulik’s hair grew matted and coarse and filthy. One of his tusks was broken jaggedly. He wore a scrap of black cloth about his middle, much covered with dust and dung and his yellow skin was likewise befouled. In one hand he carried a long pole fabricated from a number of spliced lengths cut from the twisted and scrawny bushes that were all that grew hereabouts, and the end of the pole carried a yoke-like fork. A basket woven of dry stems enclosed four of the little opossum creatures. The Chulik was busy about the task of catching a fifth, poking and prying down into a shallow hole beneath a boulder, moving with an alacrity pathetic in comparison with the lithe and vigorous movements of the Chuliks I had known.
I waited.
Moments later another figure joined the first.
Again I felt astonishment.
This was a Fristle, a half-man with a face as much like a cat’s as anything else, furred, whiskered, slit-eyed, and fang-mouthed. Although I still had no love for Fristles — for Fristles had carried my Delia off to captivity in Zenicce so soon after I had been taken to Kregen for the second time — much of my dislike had been mitigated by the gallant actions of Sheemiff, the female Fristle, she who had called me her Jikai and had so proudly worn the yellow-painted vosk-skull helmet when my rabble army of slaves and workers revolted in Magdag.
This Fristle wore a black breechclout, was as filthy and downcast as the Chulik. He carried the curved scimitar that is the racial weapon of the Fristles, but its hangings and lockets were tarnished and broken. What had brought these two representatives of proud and haughty races so low?
The impression grew in me strongly that I had nothing to fear from them. The strangeness of that feeling must be apparent to you who have listened to my story so far. I stepped out and lifted my hand.
“Llahal!” I called, using the double-L prefix, after the Welsh fashion, to the word of greeting, as was right when encountering strangers.
They looked up sluggishly.
After a time the Fristle said: “Llahal.”
The Chulik said: “Why do you not work?”
“I am going to the coast.”
For a moment they did not understand. Then the Fristle cackled. I know, now, that laughter for him and the others here occurred so infrequently that it might never have been invented; it came almost as seldom to them as it does to me.
“I have marched from the Hostile Territories, through the Owlarh Waste, and I have not come here to be laughed at — by a Fristle least of all.”
In response the Fristle merely blinked. His hand did not even fall to his scimitar hilt. The Chulik cowered back, but he did not lift the forked pole against me. I rolled out a vile Makki-Grodno oath.
What had happened to these men? What power had so ferociously tamed them into pitiful wrecks of their former selves?
Also, the thought occurred to me, it is said there is hereditary enmity between Chulik and Fristle, except when they are engaged by the same employer.
Knowing that, I was profoundly impressed when the Fristle helped the Chulik hoist the cage containing the four opossum creatures onto his back. I caught a glimmering, then, that whatever horrific experiences these men had gone through had brought them closer together and by stripping away the artificialities of race and species had displayed them to each other in adversity as creatures together beneath Zair and Grodno.
“The grint has gone, now,” said the Chulik. He spoke in the whine habitual to the slave. “Four will not be enough, but that is all the Phokaym will get.”[3]
At this name, this name of Phokaym, both Chulik and Fristle gave an involuntary shudder. Before I could say another word they hunched around and slouched off, quickly vanishing into the tangle of boulders at the end of the draw.
I ran fleetingly enough after them; but when I entered the rock-strewn area I saw quickly that they had taken themselves off and lost me, traveling by secret paths and passages they would know well. Pushing on through this country grew more difficult in the following few burs and so, at last, I chanced striding out along the old road of empire.
One vital fact was very clear. In this area lived some power of such strength that it could reduce arrogant beast-men to a cowering state lower than that of a whip-beaten slave. From the evidence of the Fristle’s scimitar I judged that they were not slaves. All resistance had been knocked out of them, and warriors who had strode victoriously over a score of battlefields had been reduced to a state of abject degradation. All this was proved to be true — as I found to my cost, as you shall hear. Occasionally I glimpsed over the twisted and fantastically jumbled landscape on either side of the road more of these subdued people, men and women, Ochs, Rapas, Fristles, and
