Silence is Deadly (7 page)

He had seen both men and women carrying thin sided ceramic pots with gaping mouths, a sort of shopping bag into which they stuffed their purchases. He also had observed that the Kammian with his hands occupied was excused from the amenities of greetings or casual conversation.

“When in doubt,” he told himself, “keep your hands shut.”

He stopped at a ceramics shop and bought a pot. He found it astonishingly light. As he moved on down the street he added a few casual purchases that he thought he couldn’t go wrong on—a bundle of scented candles, a chunk of exquisitely scented soap, a pie-shaped loaf of bread that seemed as strongly perfumed as the soap and was handed to him wrapped in a thin, crinkly substance he was unable to identify. With these credentials as a shopper and householder, and relieved of any obligation to make conversation, he blithely strolled on.

Now he was able to study the Kammians at close range. They were a sturdy race. The females, once he became accustomed to their outlandish hairdos, were handsome with a well-built rustic appeal. The flowing garments hinted at sensational Earth-type figures, which of course was an impossibility. The Kammians gave birth to live, dependent young, but they were not mammals. The males were stocky and robust.

Then he made a shattering discovery.

The Kammians were as fascinated with him as he was with them. Each person he passed turned and looked after him perplexedly.

Dumfoundedly he walked on, staring straight ahead of him in frozen bewilderment. He was dressed flawlessly, he was acting his role perfectly, he looked and behaved like the complete Kammian. And in this mundane little lane, with its throngs of coming and going shoppers, he stood out like an alien thumb.

CHAPTER 5

An instant later he realized what was wrong. The passers-by who turned to look after him were
sniffing
perplexedly.

Then
he remembered the startling array of perfumes at the Synthesis headquarters. They were not there because the agent who occupied the house acted the role of a perfumer. They were there because he acted the role of a Kammian.

Kom Rmmon had mentioned that scent dominated Kammian psychology even more than color and touch. Everything was scented—candles, soap, bread, cider, cloth, everything. And every adult Kammian had personal perfumes for varying personal moods. Such scents were not the pungent aromas of incense one encountered at the doors of dwellings, but a subtle blending of fragrances that suggested something of the body rather than a concoction applied to it.

To meet a Kammian without a personal perfume was unheard of, and Darzek wore no perfume. No wonder passers-by turned and sniffed perplexedly!

Darzek’s instant reaction would have been to buy himself some perfume and splash it on. Before he could act, he received another jolting revelation. The garments he wore identified him as a perfume maker. A Kammian without perfume was a freak, but a professional perfumer without perfume was unthinkable! He stood out in that crowded lane like a nude at a formal banquet, and there was nothing he could do about it. An unperfumed perfumer buying from a competitor would attract the attention of everyone in sight.

He stopped at the next soapmaker’s shop and bought two large chunks of the most pungently scented soap in stock. At a neighboring shop he bought a bundle of foully reeking leaves, though he had no notion of what they were used for. He had the immediate satisfaction of being ignored by those he met.

A few moments later, the question of a personal scent for Darzek became irrelevant. He had reached the mart, where many vendors worked from carts or wagons, and each vehicle had been hauled to the mart by one or more of the ungainly nabrula. Each nabrulk possessed its own sulfurous odor and in addition was polluting the mart atmosphere with piles of incongruously small, noisome pellets.

This supplied Darzek with another puzzle concerning alien psychology. So acute was the Kammian sense of smell, so subtly attuned to the delicacies of scent, that it instantly detected a passer-by without perfume; and yet it could tolerate the stench of nabrula manure. He wondered if the Kammians were able to sniff selectively, to tune out the familiar odors that displeased them, just as a musician on Earth could sit surrounded by a trashy music he despised and not hear a note of it.

At the center of the mart, towering above the vendors, were the dual symbols of the religions of Storoz. Erected atop a slender pole was a soaring image of the hideous Winged Beast. Nearby stood the lofty, pyramidal Mound of the Sun. Darzek postponed studying them until he reached a closer vantage point. He strolled along the rows of carts and tents and booths, marveling again at the variety of goods and produce offered for sale and enjoying himself immensely. Kammians were enthusiastic and voluble hagglers. Fingers fluttered at dazzling speeds as vendor and customer shouted at each other in silent, simultaneous outbursts.

There also were artists present, sculpting relief plaques from life or painting and selling abstracts with dazzling color combinations. And there was an occasional poet, reciting an epic of ancient grandeur to a small audience that sometimes parted with a lead coin or two in response but more often turned away in boredom.

Darzek reached the end of the row of vendors, and abruptly he found himself looking into a long, narrow amphitheater. Its sloping sides were thronged with spectators. At the bottom, facing each other on foot, some ten meters apart, were two armed gladiators, one with a red cloak and the other with purple.

They were massive individuals, with long mustaches to match their beefy builds. Their armor was of leather: Each wore a knee-length tunic of a peculiar leather mail, a leather helmet, and leather leg guards and gloves. Strapped to the left arm was a leather shield. The right hand held a whip, its long lash coiled peculiarly and poised for action. The left hand carried another whip with a number of short lashes attached—the Kammian version of the cat-o’-nine-tails, except that there were more than nine and the lashes were not knotted.

The red gladiator took a step forward. Suddenly the purple opponent’s long lash snapped. Red caught the vicious stroke on his shield and snapped a return stroke that the other side-stepped. They maneuvered, cautiously edging sideways, feinting whip strokes.

Darzek quickly found the spectacle boring. He turned his attention to the Kammians, who were tense with excitement. Doubtlessly they sensed a strategy of maneuver, of psychological intimidation, that was beyond his perception. He saw only a couple of costumed buffoons waving whips at each other.

Then the sudden intake of breath by the hundreds of spectators produced an audible effect, uncanny in the continuing silence that had been punctuated only by whip cracks. Darzek turned quickly. Purple had aimed a low stroke that coiled about red’s leg. He jerked the whip. Red struggled frantically to keep his balance—and failed. As he toppled, purple raced toward him with hand whip ready to flail—but red, from a prone position, snapped off a stroke with the long lash. It cut like a lightning flash, and Darzek never saw the flickering end of it.

Neither did purple. Rashly charging in for the kill, his shield poorly positioned, he was struck full in the face. Blood spurted from a horrible mutilation. A ribbon of flesh hung from his face, and his eye had vanished. He reeled backward, defenseless, his entire body contorted with shock and pain, as red regained his feet and sprang toward him with hand whip poised. An official suddenly darted between them waving a banner.

Darzek turned to the spectators. Everywhere he looked, he saw fluttering fingers. For a moment he was too shaken to read them.

Then he understood. All hands were spelling out, over and over, Blood! Blood! Blood!

As Darzek turned away, the loser was being helped from the field. The winner stood in the center of the amphitheater, proudly holding the banner of victory aloft, and the audience was tossing coins to him.

Such were the knights of Kamm.

Such were the Kammians. Darzek had been condescendingly viewing this healthy, sturdy, well-balanced, creative people as almost human. Now he saw them as entirely too human, and their whip had to be one of the most infamous creations of any intelligence. The deadly sjambok of Africa seemed a toy by comparison.

He turned for a final glance at the arena. The next entrants were mounted. One knight sat at either end of the amphitheater on a pawing nabrulk, waiting while the official picked up the winning knight’s money.

Still shaken by the bloody combat he had seen, Darzek returned to the cluttered mart and took a diagonal lane that led directly to the religious monuments. There he stood for a moment, looking from the colorful pyramid to the grim black symbol on the pole. They were light and darkness, or good and evil, or life and death—a dualism probably present in every religious consciousness; a conundrum posed on every world that had given birth to intelligent life. It seemed predictable to Darzek that this bright, peaceful, essentially good people, who could attend a gladiatorial combat and chant—with fluttering fingers—
Blood!,
should wage a bitter struggle among themselves as to whether they should worship life or death.

The Mound of the Sun was a monument to life—a life pyramid. It was not a cold edifice of tooled or polished stone, but a warm memorial to the living, vibrant with the color and beauty of growing plants and flowers. Paths meandered about it, in gradual ascents, and colored rocks sparkled amid the greenery. The Kammians left their market purchases in orderly rows about its base to climb it, whether a short distance or all the way to the tiny park-like area on its truncated apex, and to sit and meditate the beauties and mysteries of life or perhaps just to admire the view.

The companion monument was stark by comparison—a stereotyped representation of the fabled Winged Beast in a gigantic wood carving: wings outspread, the long, vicious fangs that filled the tapering snout bared, talons poised threateningly, and the whole painted a gleaming black. It towered almost twenty meters above the market on its slender pole. At its base stood two young males in black clothing and black capes—lackeys of the Winged Beast, or apprentice priests, or student soldiers.

In contrast to the relaxed crowds on the Mound of the Sun, few people came near the stark symbol of death. Those who did had a furtive air, as though they were paying off a blackmailer. They fumbled among their purchases and then approached the monument timorously. One of the apprentice priests handed out slender pointed sticks that looked like enormous toothpicks. On these the faithful impaled their offerings—pieces of meat, or bread, or cake, or other edibles. Bowing reverently with a queer, sidewise genuflection, they stepped into the black circle formed at the base of the pole by a mosaic of ebony-colored stones. They inserted the offering stick into one of the multitude of holes bored into the pole for that purpose. Then they backed away, hands raised pleadingly, eyes on the menacing Beast, until they reached their possessions.

They scurried off like one who has had a death sentence repealed.

Light and darkness; life and death.

Darzek set down his shopping pot and climbed the life pyramid all the way to the top. Looking over at the soaring Winged Beast, he pondered the sinister darkness in a people’s soul that could call forth such a symbol, and he wondered what the missing Synthesis agents could have told him about that darkness.

The city lay to the south. From Darzek’s vantage point he watched plodding nabrula pulling carts and wagons along the lanes; saw the scattered forums, the neighborhood markets, where women and children did their daily shopping or drew water from wells; saw the racks of wood curing behind the craft establishments; saw the hand-woven rugs airing; saw a thin haze of pollution rising from soap and candlemakers’ factories. He reflected again that the idea of a pazul being developed in such a society was preposterous.

He moved around the pyramid and looked down on the harbor, where clumsy but colorful rectangular-sailed ships were maneuvering to their dockage. He asked himself whether even the most eccentric genius would waste time on death rays, or even conceive of such a thing, with the need for technological improvements everywhere evident. He muttered aloud, “Preposterous!” Then he winced and looked about him; but the female and three children seated nearby had of course heard nothing. They were looking out to sea—the wife and children of a sailor, perhaps, come to watch the absent one’s ship return to port. The two daughters were amusing little replicas of their mother, their hair dyed and put up in identical patterns. The son wore a green sailor’s garb. It was a charming family group, touchingly awaiting a reunion, and Darzek watched it with pleasure before turning away. A pazul? Preposterous!

At least he now knew where he was. The harbor faced north, and there was only one such port on the island: Northpor, one of the five Free Cities that were the property of the powerful Sailor’s League.

He circled back for another look at the city before descending. He suddenly had become worried about finding his way home, and he wanted to trace his route. He took one look at the street pattern and froze.

He had thought all he needed to do was find a pink lane.

But all of the surlanes, the main traffic arteries, were paved with pink stone.

* * * *

Wearily Darzek made his way down the pyramid. He was hungry and tired. His arms ached from carrying the shopping pot. He was ready to go home, wherever or whatever home was. He picked up his pot and walked away, trying to visualize the house he would have to find.