Part 9 (1/2)

Hoddan grunted. It could be that he was being told a tall tale. But back at the s.p.a.ceport, the men who came after him waving large knives had seemed sincere enough.

”Why should we be ambushed?” he asked. ”And why do you hope for it?”

”Your weapons would destroy our enemies,” said Thal placidly, ”and the pickings would be good.” He added: ”We should be ambushed because the Lady Fani refused to marry the Lord Ghek. She is Don Loris' daughter, and to refuse to marry a man is naturally a deadly insult. So he should ravage Don Loris' lands at every opportunity until he gets a chance to carry off the Lady Fani and marry her by force. That is the only way the insult can be wiped out.”

”I see,” said Hoddan ironically.

He didn't. The two horses topped a rise, and far in the distance there was a yellow light, with a mist above it as of illuminated smoke.

”That is Don Loris' stronghold,” said Thal. He sighed. ”It looks like we may not be ambushed.”

They weren't. It was very dark where the horses forged ahead through brushwood. As they moved onward, the single light became two. They were great bonfires burning in iron cages some forty feet up in the air.

Those cages projected from the battlements of a ma.s.sive, cut-stone wall.

There was no light anywhere else underneath the stars.

Thal rode almost underneath the cressets and shouted upward. A voice answered. Presently a gate clanked open and a black, cavelike opening appeared behind it. Thal rode grandly in, and Hoddan followed. Now that the ride seemed over, he let himself realize where he ached from the unaccustomed exercise. Everywhere. He also guessed at the area of his skin first rubbed to blisters and then to the discomfort of raw flesh underneath.

The gate clanked shut. Torches waved overhead. Hoddan found that he and Thal had ridden into a very tiny courtyard. Twenty feet above them, an inner battlemented wall offered excellent opportunities for the inhabitants of the castle to throw things down at visitors who after admission turned out to be undesired.

Thal shouted further identifications, including a boastful and entirely untruthful declaration that he and Hoddan, together, had slaughtered twenty men in one place and thirty in another, and left them lying in their gore.

The voices that replied sounded derisive. Somebody came down a rope and fastened the gate from the inside. With an extreme amount of creaking, an inner gate swung wide. Men came out of it and took the horses. Hoddan dismounted, and it seemed to him that he creaked as loudly as the gate.

Thal swaggered, displaying coins he had picked from the pockets of the men the stun-pistols had disabled. He said splendidly to Hoddan:

”I go to announce your coming to Don Loris. These are his retainers.

They will give you to drink.” He added amiably, ”If you were given food, it would be disgraceful to cut your throat.”

He disappeared. Hoddan carried his s.h.i.+p bag and followed a man in a dirty pink s.h.i.+rt to a stone-walled room containing a table and a chair.

He sat down, relieved to have a rest for his back. The man in the pink s.h.i.+rt brought him a flagon of wine. He disappeared again.

Hoddan drank sour wine and brooded. He was very hungry and very tired, and it seemed to him that he had been disillusioned in a new dimension.

Morbidly, he remembered a frequently given lecture from his grandfather on Zan.

”It's no use!” it was the custom of his grandfather to say. ”There's not a bit o' use in having brains! All they do is get you into trouble! A lucky idiot's ten times better off than a brainy man with a jinx on him!

A smart man starts thinkin', and he thinks himself into a jail cell if his luck is bad, and good luck's wasted on him because it ain't reasonable and he don't believe in it when it happens! It's taken me a lifetime to keep my brains from ruinin' me! No, sir! I hope none o' my descendants inherit my brains! I pity 'em if they do!”

Hoddan had been on Darth not more than four hours. In that time he'd found himself robbed, had resented it, had been the object of two spirited attempts at a.s.sa.s.sination, had ridden an excruciating number of miles on an unfamiliar animal, and now found himself in a stone dungeon and deprived of food lest feeding him obligate his host not to cut his throat. And he'd gotten into this by himself! He'd chosen it! He'd practically asked for it!

He began strongly to share his grandfather's disillusioned view of brains.

After a long time the door of the cell opened. Thal was back, chastened.

”Don Loris wants to talk to you,” he said in a subdued voice. ”He's not pleased.”