Once a year, all the barons gathered in the capital for the Allthing, a legislative body that established policies for the Council to execute during the next year, and decided legal cases between noblemen.
Gar was amazed that there was even that much division of power, and wondered how it came to be—but Wulfsson’s mind seemed to be curiously empty of history, and historically empty of curiosity.
His concussion healed quickly, but it still took days—and during those days, Gar saw sights he would never forget. Overseers prodded him whenever he didn’t move fast enough to please them, which happened whenever they were bored. He talked back once, and a dozen overseers descended on him to beat him with sticks and iron-shod prods; reading their minds as he tried to block their blows, Gar realized they had been waiting for the new slave to try to stand up for himself.
Later in the day, he saw a man whipped for refusing to beat a woman when the overseers commanded it. That evening, Kawsa ordered Gar to take a load of wood up to the steward’s house, and Gar saw that the house staff, old male slaves and middle-aged women, were all hopeless, apathetic people who had only one emotion left—fear. The table servants had decent clothing; everyone else wore the same rags as the field hands.
By the end of the week, Gar decided he’d seen enough to be sure this regime had to be torn down, and had a notion that he himself would sponsor a tribunal for crimes committed under its aegis. He tested his powers, first on the weeds he was hoeing, and when the first yanked itself out of the ground, he felt a soaring jubilation. A few minutes later, he thought sleepy thoughts at Kawsa, and was rewarded with a series of yawns. That evening, when a skinny old man had to wrestle an armload of wood up to the steward’s house, Gar pushed the wood with his mind, and saw the man straighten in surprise, then walk with a lighter step all the way to the back door. Gar smiled, knowing his range might not be as far as it had been, but was definitely far enough. He searched Kawsa’s memories and found where his pack had been stored.
After dark, he tested his dexterity by thinking a kink into a particular tube in Kawsa’s anatomy, and was rewarded by hearing a curse from the hayloft across the yard. There was also the sound of a slap, unfortunately, but only one, and a few minutes later, Kawsa came storming out of the barn, face red with fury. The woman who had been his night’s choice came out soon after, dazed by her escape.
Gar lay on his pallet, tense with excitement and anticipation. His brain was healed, and he was ready.
The planet had three moons, though none was as bright as Terra’s. When all three were in the sky together, they gave quite a bit of light indeed. Gar had already pegged the hour of the first one’s rising, and slipped out in the full darkness of early night, while only the stars held the sky. The overseer on watch wasn’t Kawsa, unfortunately, but Gar had his grudges with all of them by now, so any one would do. As the man crossed the barnyard, Gar willed him to look away from the shadow where the giant crouched, then thought of sleep, of the softness of a bed, of its warmth and coziness, of how wonderful it would feel to nod off…
He jerked his head upright; it had been a long day, and his spell was working on himself. But it worked on the overseer, too; the man paused to yawn, then leaned against the side of the barracks. He yawned again and again; his head nodded, then jerked upright, his eyes blinking; but he yawned yet again, nodded some more, then slipped to the ground, not even waking enough to notice he had fallen.
Gar stepped over to take the man’s cloak, hat, and prod. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it would have to do. Then he slipped into the shadows, going from outbuilding to outbuilding until he was catfooting past the steward’s house. He stopped to take his pack from the toolshed, then crept onward.
When he came to the road, he paused. He had never been out this way before; the slaves always went to the fields behind the house, and Gar had a vague notion the crops across the road belonged to someone else. He called to mind the photo-map he had studied in orbit, remembered where the sun rose, and turned to his right, following the road to the east, hunched over under the cloak, tapping with the staff as though he were an old man, trying to look no taller than five and a half feet.
It almost worked. But as he passed the next farmhouse, a voice out of the night snapped, “Who goes there?”
“It’s a slave!” someone shouted from the other side of the road. “A big one, trying to hide his inches!”
Then they hit him, half a dozen at least, furious blows of iron-shod prods, shouting in anger.
This time, though, Gar was ready for them. He set a bubble of mental force around himself; it wasn’t strong enough to stop the blows, but it slowed them enough so that their hurt was minor, and so that Gar could block some, then return them with harder blows of his own. He parried an overhand blow, kicked the man in the stomach, whirled around and jumped high to kick another man in the chest and struck downward to crack a third over the head. As he landed, though, a blow from behind made his head ring; he fell to his knees, groping frantically for the man’s mind, lashing out with the outrage and anger of a week, only a week…
He heard the strangled cry even as he pushed himself to his feet. He stepped over the body toward the lone overseer who still stood, backing away from him, the whites showing all around his eyes in terror, shouting, “What did you do to him? What did you do?”
Gar reached out for the man, who turned and ran. Gar thought of stumbling, toes catching against the opposite ankle, and the man went down in a tangle. Before he could even cry out for help, Gar let a burst of illumination explode in the man’s mind and savored his lapse into unconsciousness. Then he took the man’s sword and hid it under his own cloak.
Lamps were lighting up in the farmhouse, and voices were calling in alarm. Gar stepped back into the shadows and thought very intensely into the mind of each man who was still alive—five out of six wasn’t bad. A few minutes later, he relaxed, then slipped away to find a brook he could wade. The men would wake, he knew, and all tell the same story of the bear who had come out of the night and fought in eerie silence, striking down overseer after overseer—and if one had mysteriously died without a mark on him, well, no one could be surprised that he had died of sheer fright.
For himself, Gar wouldn’t mourn the man. It was a week for firsts in his life—he felt not the slightest hint of remorse.
3
Alea was just managing to begin to drowse when a crow of triumph jolted her awake, and the tree shook. She grabbed at the limb to her right in a panic, then remembered that she had tied herself to the trunk and couldn’t fall.
“Come down, my pretty!” a hoarse voice called, and the tree shook again.
Looking down, Alea saw two boys standing by the trunk and joining their strength to shake it.
“Come down and play!” one of them called. “Rokir and I are tired of our own games!”
Their games hadn’t been much fun, from the look of them. They were gaunt from short rations and hollow-eyed from lack of sleep.