The dwarves held their formation until the last boat was well out from shore, then turned to embrace one another, slap each other’s backs, and even break into an impromptu dance here and there.
Magnus stared at the close-up. “Some of them are beardless…”
“And their cuirasses are very pronounced about their gender,” Herkimer finished. “Many of those warriors are women.”
“No wonder, when they’re so badly outnumbered, and so small into the bargain! We’re looking at a military society, Herkimer.”
“Ii would seem so,” the computer agreed. “Holding so tight a formation under the stress of battle speaks of long training.”
“Yes, from childhood, probably.” Magnus frowned. “And as with the giants, if we could find a battle so quickly, they have to be common—another part of life, like plowing and reaping.”
“A time to sow, a time to reap, and a time for war,”—the computer agreed.
But the dwarf slaves in these fields hadn’t learned to fight, and the only time for them was a time to suffer.
When the sun neared the horizon, Kawsa and half a dozen other overseers lined them up with shouts and insults, then started them off in a shuffling line back to the farmstead. They went down through rows of barley and hops to a broad farmyard of clean tan gravel. Another file of slaves was driving cows into a milking barn, and three others were pouring swill into the troughs of a huge pigsty. Gar’s file shuffled past them all to a long ramshackle shed of unpainted boards, and inside.
There the silence ended. Half of the slaves dropped down onto pallets of moldy straw with moans of relief. Others only sat down on rude benches, but everyone breathed sighs of relief. Even the older children sat down with groans, their dusty little faces lined with weariness. The younger children had been able to nap in the field, though, and still frolicked and quarrelled. Magnus expected some of the tired adults to snap at the little ones, but they only sighed with philosophic patience—and a surprising number of them watched the children with doting smiles. Even in the midst of such misery, they found pleasure in the innocent squabbles and joys of their children.
Magnus noticed a great lack of water, and a greater need for it.
A tall young woman came up to him with a bucket from which she lifted a dripping ladle. “Drink, lad, for you’ll need it!”
“Thank you,” Magnus said sincerely, and drank the ladle dry, thinking it was the sweetest drink he had ever had during peacetime—if you could call this peace. He handed it back to the woman with a sigh of relief. “I needed that.”
“I’m sure you did,” she said, then reached out to touch his forehead, frowning anxiously. Magnus forced himself to hold still, though the touch of her fingers hurt. “You’ve a right ugly bruise there,” she told him, “and a few more I can’t see, I don’t doubt.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Magnus told her. “I’ve a dozen aches at least. Believe me, I’ve had hours to count them.” “Don’t I know it!” she said. “My name’s Greta.”
“I’m honored to meet you, Greta.” Magnus inclined his head gravely. “My name is Gar Pike.”
She stared at him in surprise, then gave him a wan smile. “A gar pike, are you? Gar I don’t doubt, and you’re a poor fish indeed, to let yourself be caught like this. But why take such a name for yourself?”
The question brought a sudden wave of longing for his nice, safe spaceship lounge, and a memory of Herkimer saying, only hours before, “Why do you insist on using that abominable alias when you go planetside to start a revolution, Magnus?”
Magnus shrugged. “You never can tell when there are going to be secret agents around, from SCENT or some other Terran government agency. I’d just as soon they didn’t recognize me by name.”
“Surely the name of Gar Pike must be almost as famous as that of d’Armand, by now.”
“Not to SCENT, fortunately—unless they’ve had agents on every planet I’ve visited.” Magnus’s mouth tightened at the thought of his own brief stint as a SCENT agent, and his disillusionment with their methods. His father, Rod Gallowglass, whose real name was Rodney d’Armand, was one of the most famous agents of the Society for the Conversion of Extraterrestrial Nascent Totalitarianisms—famous because he had discovered Magnus’s home planet of Gramarye with its potentially explosive population of espers. For three decades now, he had been holding the planet secure against the schemes and plots of two futurian organizations, one trying to subvert Gramarye to some form of totalitarian government so that its telepaths would be at the service of its interstellar dictatorship, the other trying to subvert the planet to anarchy so that the telepaths would help spread its unrealistically idealistic form of chaos throughout the human-colonized planets. Rod Gallowglass had short-circuited all their schemes with the help of his native-born wife Gwendylon and their four children—three, since Magnus had taken to the stars, unable to accept his father’s imposing of democracy on a people who might not want it. He had joined SCENT under an assumed name, become even more disenchanted with its methods than with his father’s, and gone off on his own to bring about social change in a way about which he could feel right—which meant that he sought out planets where the majority were really miserably oppressed, and the only solution was revolution.
So here he was, talking to another miserable one, and trying to explain, “The name was given me as much as I chose it.” He realized he had better think of himself as “Gar Pike” for the rest of his time on this planet.
Greta’s wan smile warmed a little. “Don’t you ever talk like a proud lord, though!”
“Is he all right?” asked another woman anxiously, coming up to them. Gar looked down and saw she wasn’t even five feet tall.
“He seems well enough,” Greta answered her. “He walks fairly straight, and his limp’s almost gone.”
“I’m past the worst of it,” Gar confirmed.
“This is Rega.” Greta gestured to the smaller woman. “Honored to meet you, Rega.”
Rega smiled up at him. “No wonder the overseers set about you so hard, with your courtly ways. Where did you escape from, lad? I know Groi says you’re from far away, but that can’t be, can it?”
Groi, Gar decided, must be the small man who had talked to him out in the field. “It’s quite true. I wanted to see something of the world before I settled down.”
“Seen enough yet?” Greta asked with a sardonic smile. They were very surprised when Gar said, “Too much—but not enough.”
2
Gar was certainly seeing the world of Siegfried, and was regretting every minute of it—but he and Herkimer had tried to reason out the social conditions on the plane from the evidence of what they had seen, until Herkimer had finally said, “There simply is not enough information to justify any conclusions about this culture, Magnus.”
“Other than that we need more information,” Magnus said with a wry smile. “Still, we’ve seen two battles producing dead bodies in a very short space of time. I think constant warfare is reason enough to help these people make a change in their form of government, don’t you?”
“Help, or incite?” The computer was capable of recognizing irony, if not actual humor. “Provisionally, I would have to agree. After all, you have engineered one peaceful revolution already—why not start a revolution to bring peace? But if the tallest and shortest of the Midlanders are really locked in to slavery and the misery that almost always accompanies it, I would say that was an even stronger reason.”