The Hostage of Zir (8 page)

Following the Regent out, Reith reached up and gave his head a tug. He wanted to be sure it was firmly attached to him still.

VI

THE RAILROAD TO ZIR

Considine and Turner climbed into the railroad car. Looking at the wooden seats, the former said: “Hey, Fearless, what’s this? A cattle car? I suppose you’d call it a shaihan car, eh?”

Silvester Pride grumbled: “These damned native shoes don’t fit. The right and left are just alike. After I’d stood over the gook and showed him how I wanted them made, too!”

“Where will they put those workmen Mr. Strachan was hiring?” said Santiago Guzmán-Vidal. “We don’t want a lot of essmelly natives in with us.”

“Hae, laddie!” cried Strachan, swinging aboard. “All aboard the Gha’id Special?”

“All present,” said Reith. “They’re worried about the Duruma, though. They—ah—they’d rather not share the car—”

“What a bunch of bloody snobs!” said Strachan. “But they needn’t worry. My Krishnans have two cars of their own. They wouldn’t want to ride with
Ertsuma
anyway; say they smell bad. There goes our other locomotive. We need a double-header.”

The tourists looked out the window as the second bishtar lumbered past. The animal had a body and limbs of vaguely elephantine shape, save that six pillarlike legs supported the long, cylindrical body. Although furnished with a pair of trunks, the head was not like an elephant’s. It more resembled that of a gigantic tapir, with an elongated, bifurcated proboscis. Each fork of the split trunk was about a meter long. The swiveling ears were of trumpetlike shape. The animal was covered with short, smooth, glossy fur, a deep purplish brown with white spots.

Abaft the ears, a Krishnan mahout sat on a saddle astride the neck, talking to the beast in a language known only to bishtars and their masters. From ahead came a rattle of chains as the second bishtar was harnessed in front of the first.

Then came another long wait, until the tourists squirmed and began asking Reith for explanations. Reith asked Strachan, who asked the conductor.

“Just stowing a piece of freight,” reported Strachan.

“These natives!” said Guzmán-Vidal. “No sense of the time.”

At last someone called:
“Byant-hao!”
A trumpet blew. The train started with a jerk and a clatter of couplings. It clicked over switch points and out on the qong-wood rails of the main line.

Flanges groaned, axles screeched, couplings clanked, and harness jingled. Under all the noise came the muffled thud of the twelve columnar legs of their power unit. Lurching and swaying, the twelve little wooden cars rolled westward at fourteen or fifteen Terran kilometers an hour.

The track wound along the shore of the Va’andao Sea, of which those in the train caught occasional glimpses to the left. Otherwise an endless panorama of farm and forest swept past. After the first hour, the farms became scarcer.

Most of the time, the train was shut in on both sides by a dense temperate-zone forest. This, despite the rainbow hues of its foliage (like New Hampshire in the fall, said Mrs. Whitney Scott), in time became monotonous. Now and then, a wild Krishnan herbivore, grazing along the right of way, looked up from its nibbling and bolted into the woods as the train rocked past.

When the train began to descend a grade, whistles blew and trainmen shouted. These rushed back and forth to apply hand brakes, lest the cars roll forward and bump the after bishtar.

Turner got up to visit the little toilet enclosure in the end of the car. He grabbed at seat backs as the car lurched. At last he missed a grab and landed in the ample lap of Mélanie Jussac. Madame Jussac said: “Oh, the little boy wants his mozzer,
non?
You are lucky you did not fall in the lap of the Señora Guzmán, or Santiago would be after you with his sword!”

Laughing, she set Turner back on his feet. He continued his lurching progress saying: “This is worse than the old West Chester local, before they upgraded the roadbed.”

After assuring himself that his tourists were safe for the nonce, Reith got up to explore. Forward, between their car and the two bishtars, were two flatcars piled with freight and lashed down with tarpaulins. Aft were two more coaches, filled with Krishnan workmen, and behind these came two more freight cars. After a look at the meter-wide gap between his own swaying, yawing car and the next one aft, Reith went back into his own car and handed his sword to Guzmán-Vidal, saying: “Would you please hold this, Santiago? I don’t want to jump to the next car and have this thing trip me up.”

Reith jumped the gap and continued into the Krishnan-occupied car. He found Strachan on one of the seats, smoking a powerful Krishnan cigar and talking fluent Durou with one of his workmen.

“Ahoy, laddie!” said Strachan. “Not quite the Royal Scot, is it? But give ’em time. The Industrial Revolution’s on its way. Come back in a hundred years and you won’t know the planet. They’ll probably go through an automobile age, the same as we did, until their petroleum gives out. That is, if they have petroleum.”

“Won’t that lead to a lot of turmoil, revolution, and so on?”

Strachan shrugged. “Belike, but what can we do? Once they know it can be done—and we’ve shown them it can by example—they’ll not rest until they’ve done it, too. It does no good to warn them against Terran mistakes. Still and on, they’re an uncoly volatile, scrappy lot, so a little more violence won’t make much difference.”

“Ken,” said Reith, “you were going to tell me about these characters out in Zir, the Dasht and the Witch.” He had to shout to be heard above the clatter.

“Weel, now—hold on; we’re going into a siding.”

As the train struck a reverse curve, Reith grabbed a seat back to keep from being thrown into a Krishnan’s lap. Trainmen bustled back and forth. Brake shoes ground, and the train slowed to a halt. They stood on a double-tracked section.

“What’s this?” asked Reith.

“We’re stopping for two purposes; namely, to wait for the regular eastbound daily from Jizorg to go by on the main track, and to eat our lunch.”

“I wondered how we’d eat with these things bucking like broncos. Don’t Krishnan railroads have double-tracked lines?”

“Not yet; traffic’s not dense enough. Tell your folk to get off and stretch if they like. We shan’t go off without them.”

Reith hurried back to his own car and handed out the box lunches piled on one of the seats. Presently his tourists were all sitting or standing beside the train, eating and drinking. Up forward, the bishtars had been unhitched and guided to the edge of the forest There they fell to feeding. Each animal grabbed a huge mass of many-colored vegetation in the fork of its cleft trunk, wrenched it loose, and stuffed it into its cavernous maw.

“Sheugh, man!” came a sudden shout from Strachan. “Watch that stuff!”

Reith looked around. Strachan was speaking to Professor Mulroy, who had been about to pick a sprig of a plant with leaves of a striking pattern of black and white stripes. Strachan explained: “That’s the
sha’pir,
or zebra weed if you prefer. It works like your American poison ivy. Only, in accord with the principle that everything nasty here is twice as nasty, it comes on twice as quick, itches twice as bad, and lasts twice as long.

“When Siggy and I were working in Suruskand, one hot day he took a dip in a pool in a river and then found he had nocht to dry himself with. So he tried to dry his hands, face, and other parts with these leaves. He was laid up so long that it cost us the bonus we’d have earned for finishing the job ahead of time.”

“My word!” said the professor. “I am exceedingly grateful to you, Mr. Strachan. This plant looks interesting. It has evidently evolved a warning coloration, analogous to that of a Terran hornet. I don’t suppose there’s a book on the poisonous plants of Krishna?”

“Not that I know. A couple of years ago, there was a human botanist in Suruskand studying the plants. But the poor birkie went out without an escort once too often, and a yeki ate him.”

“Dear me!” said Mulroy. Several tourists added exclamations. “I trust we shall not encounter such a predator without adequate protection.”

“Not here. The yeki is mainly a plains dweller, found in places like the prairies of Ruz. Here, the largest beast of prey is the yeki’s smaller cousin, the kargan, which seldom bothers game of our size. The most dangerous are the wild eshuna, which run in packs; but they avoid parties like ours.”

“You relieve my apprehensions. I think I shall measure the bodily temperature of the bishtars.” Mulroy produced a clinical thermometer. “I do not believe it has yet been ascertained.”

“Hey!” said Reith. “If you try to stick that up its—”

“Have no fears, Fergus. That is not how one does it with a large, formidable animal.”

“How, then?”

“It is simple. One follows the organism until it defecates and inserts the thermometer into a fresh dropping.” The professor ambled off, expectantly watching the bishtars.

Having finished his lunch, Reith said in a low voice: “Ken, could you step over this way with me? I want to hear about Zir, but I’d rather my geese didn’t overhear our talk.”

“Weel, Fergus, Zir is a wild bit of mountainous country at the northwest corner of the Va’andao. Dur and Gozashtand both lay claim to it whiles, but neither can make its claim stick. The country’s too rugged, and the Ziruma make things lively for outsiders.”

“What about this fellow who calls himself lord of Zir?”

“Some years ago, Barré vas-Sarf got his start as a mere
bandido,
raiding the lowlands. Both Tashian and Eqrar have sent armies in after him, but they wore themselves out climbing mountain trails and were picked off in surprises and ambushes until they gave it up as a bad job.

“Meanwhile, Barré got more and more clans under his control, until he started calling himself the Dasht of Zir. Eqrar and Tashian have ordered him to declare fealty to them, but he’s told them where to stuff their demands.”

“And you think he’ll let you run Tashian’s railroad through his country?”

“Tashian thinks that, with the railroad, he can maintain enough soldiers at the end of the line to keep Barré from interfering. I hae ma doutes, but meanwhile Tashian’s paying enough gold in at Novo to make it worth Siggy’s and my while.”

“How about the so-called Witch of Zir?”

Strachan laughed. “That’s your goddamned missionaries. Why they let those maggot-mongers in, while they won’t allow honest technicians like me to teach the Krishnans something useful, I dinna ken. Political influence in high places, I suppose. If they let in the Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and such, they have to admit all the daft little cults, too. Like that fellow we met in Suruskand, who went about telling the Krishnans they were the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. He argued that, since a Krishnan animal called a
shomal
looks something like a camel, the names ‘shomal’ and ‘camel’ must come from the same root—some ancient Hebrew word,
gamal
I think.

“All this proselyting stirs up more violence and bloodshed than all the inventions of the Industrial Revolution put together. Anyhow, one of them converted a local priestess, years ago, and she built her own cult of his teachings. Now Shosti’s the leader of a far-flung sect: the Ultimate Verity, I suppose you’d call it in English. She holds that the universe is the scene of a vast war between two hostile groups of interplanetary entities, the good and the bad. We
Ertsuma
are the bad. There’s an unconfirmed rumor that the French swindler, Felix Borel, found refuge with her.”

“But if he’s one of the evil entities—”

“As I say, lad, it’s not known if he went there or not. We’ve heard nocht direct since he disappeared into the mountains. Here comes the daily.”

Another train, of five cars drawn by a single bishtar, appeared on the main track. Brave in red and blue paint, it rumbled past the sidetracked special. The Krishnans on the daily exchanged shouts and gestures of greeting with those waiting on the siding.

Strachan finished his fruit. “I see that Master Kherát, our gallant conductor, is gathering his men and beasts to move out. You’d best collect yours, too.”

Reith got all his people back aboard the train save Otto Schwerin. A frantic search at last discovered Schwerin perched in a tree, photographing.

###

As yellow Roqir vanished behind the forested ridges, the special stopped on another siding at the village of Jizorg. Strachan led Reith and his tourists across the muddy main street to the inn. There a stout Krishnan quieted his eshun, which pulled on its chain and growled. This taverner then greeted the party with bows and voluble speech, too fast and in too strong a dialect for Reith to follow.

“He says,” reported Strachan, “that in return for the honor of hosting the first tourist party from outer space, he’s converting his hovel into a palace.”

“Looks pretty much like a hovel still to me,” said Considine.

In the courtyard, the taverner stopped at a well in the center. Two workmen were laying flat stones around the wellhead to form a terrace, while a Krishnan mason chipped another stone to make it fit the circular base of the wellhead. The taverner burst into speech, with gestures.

“He says,” explained Strachan, “that the old well was good enough when he had only a few guests at a time; but, with the rise in traffic he foresees, the courtyard will be trampled into a sea of mud. Hence the masonry. Next, he says, he’ll install a windlass and crank on the coping, instead of making the servants haul their buckets up hand over hand. I said the Industrial Revolution was on the way, did I no?”

Although Reith’s tourists had become somewhat hardened, they were taken aback by the primitiveness of the accommodations. The fact that, with only four beds available, the men would have to sleep four in a bed caused especial complaint.

“I demand one bed for myself and my wife!” said Guzmán-Vidal. “The other four ladies can have the other bed. We never sleep apart, even when we are fighting!”

“Nothing doing,” said Reith.

“But I am a
man.
I cannot be separated from my woman—”

“Do you want to go back to Novo on your own?” said Reith.

Guzmán-Vidal subsided, grumbling. When Price and Considine in turn raised objections, Reith said: “Now look here! You people set out on this very expensive and time-consuming tour because you wanted to see something different from earth, didn’t you? You were warned you’d have to rough it, without Terran amenities. If there were, you’d be like those people who want to go to Timbuktu, because the name sounds romantic. When they get there, they stay at the Timbuktu Hilton and complain it’s like every other city. A little discomfort is the price you pay for anything really exotic.”