Poul Mer Lo looked at the god-king, surprised by his intelligence. ‘Lord, that was a good story. There is one like it, concerning a creature called an elephant, that is told in my own country.’
‘In the land beyond the sky?’
‘In the land beyond the sky.’
Enka Ne laughed. ‘What is truth?’ he demanded. ‘Beyond the world in which we live there is nothing but Oruri. And even I am but a passing shadow in his endless dreams.’
Poul Mer Lo decided to take a gamble. ‘Yet who can say what and what does not belong to the dreams of Oruri. Might not Oruri dream of a strange country wherein there are such things as silver birds?’
Enka Ne was silent. He folded his arms, and gazed thoughtfully down at his prisoner. The feathers rustled. Water ran from them and made little pools on the stone floor.
At last the god-king spoke. ‘The oracle has said that you are a teacher—a great teacher. Is that so?’
‘Lord, I have skills that were prized among my own people. I have a little of the knowledge of my people. I do not know if I am a great teacher. I do not yet know what I can teach.’
The answer seemed to please Enka Ne. ‘Perhaps you speak honestly Why did your comrades die?’
Until then, Poul Mer Lo had not known that he was the last survivor. He felt an intense desolation. He felt a sense of loneliness that made him cry out, as in pain.
‘You suffer?’ enquired the god-king. He looked puzzled. Poul Mer Lo spoke with difficulty. ‘I did not know that my comrades were dead.’
Again there was a silence. Enka Ne gazed disconcertingly at the pale giant kneeling before him. He moved from side to side as if inspecting the phenomenon from all possible angles. The feathers rustled. The noise of the fountains became loud, like thunder.
Eventually, the god-king seemed to have made up his mind.
‘What would you do,’ asked Enka Ne, ‘if I were to grant you freedom?’
‘I should have to find somewhere to stay.’
‘What would you do, then, if you found somewhere to stay?’
‘I should have to find someone to cook for me. I do not even know what is good and what is not good to eat.’
‘And having found a home and a woman, what then?’
‘Then, Lord, I should have to decide how I could repay the people of Baya Nor who have given me these things.’
Enka Ne stretched out a hand. ‘Live,’ he said simply.
Poul Mer Lo felt a sharp jerk. Then his arms were free. The two silent Bayani warriors lifted him to his feet. He fell down because, having kneeled so long, the blood was not flowing in his legs.
Again they lifted him and supported him.
Enka Ne gazed at him without expression. Then he turned and walked away. After three or four paces he stopped and turned again.
He glanced at Poul Mer Lo and spoke, to the guards. ‘This man has too many fingers,’ he said. ‘It is offensive to Oruri. Strike one from each hand.’
SEVEN
Poul Mer Lo was given a small thatched house that stood on short stilts just outside the sacred city, the noia with whom he had spent his imprisonment, and sixty-four copper rings. He did not know the value of the ring money; but Mylai Tui calculated that if he did not receive any further benefits from the god-king he could still live for nearly three hundred days without having to hunt or work for himself.
Poul Mer Lo thought the god-king had been more than generous, for he had provided the stranger with enough money to last his own lifetime. Wisely, perhaps, Enka Ne had not shown too much favour. He had made sure that Enka Ne the 610th would not be embarrassed by the munificence of his predecessor.
The little finger on each hand had been struck off expertly, the scars had healed and the only pain that remained was from tiny fragments of bone working their way slowly to the surface. Sometimes, when the weather was heavy, Poul Mer Lo was conscious of a throbbing. But, for the most part he had adjusted to the loss very well. It was quite remarkable how easily one could perform with only four fingers the tasks that had formerly required five.
For many days after he had received what amounted to the royal pardon, Poul Mer Lo spent his time doing nothing but learning. He walked abroad in the streets of Baya Nor and was surprised to find that he was, for the most part, ignored by the ordinary citizens. When he engaged them in conversation, his questions were answered politely; but none asked questions in return. The fate of a pygmy in the streets of London, he reflected, would very likely have been somewhat different. The fate of an extra-terrestrial in the streets of any terrestrial city would have been markedly different. Police would have been required to control the crowds—and, perhaps, disperse the lynch mobs. The more he learned, the more, he realized, he had to learn.
The population of Baya Nor, a city set in the midst of the forest, consisted of less than twenty thousand people. Of these nearly a third were farmers and craftsmen and rather more than a third were hunters and soldiers. Of the remainder, about five thousand priests maintained the temples and the waterways and about one thousand priest/lawyer/civil servants ran the city’s administration. The god-king, Enka Ne, supported by a city council and an hereditary female oracle, reigned with all the powers of a despot for one year of four hundred days—at the end of which time he was sacrificed in the Temple of the Weeping Sun while the new god-king was simultaneously ordained.
Baya Nor itself was a city of water and stone—like a great Gothic lido, thought Poul Mer Lo, dropped crazily in the middle of the wilderness. The Bayani worshipped water, perhaps because water was the very fluid of life. There were reservoirs, pools and fountains everywhere. The main thoroughfares were broad waterways, so broad that they must have taken generations to construct. In each of the four main reservoirs, temples shaped curiously like pyramids rose hazily behind a wall of fountains to the blue sky. The temples, too, were not such as could have been raised by a population of twenty thousand in less than a century. They looked very old, and they looked also as if they would endure longer than the race that built them.
In a literal and a symbolic sense Baya Nor was two cities— one within the other. The sacred city occupied a large island in the lake that was called the Mirror of Oruri. It was connected to the outer city by four narrow causeways, on each side of which were identical carvings representing all the god-kings since time immemorial.
If Baya Nor was not strong in science, it was certainly strong in art; for the generations of sculptors and masons who had carved the city out of dark warm sandstone had left behind them monuments of grandeur and classic line. Disdaining a written language, they had composed their common testament eloquently in a language of form and composition. They had married water to stone and had produced a living mobile poetry of fountains and sunlight and shadow and sandstone that was a song of joy to the greater glory of Oruri.