"You've wasted our time, you," he said. "I ought to make you pay."
"Never mind, Alfie," said the old man nervously. "He's awake now, let's be off." He was a thin and shrunken old man with jittery birdlike movements. I'd heard a certain mushi-ness in his voice before this, and now I saw why; he had no teeth, his mouth was a collapsed double flap, his stubbly chin jutting out beneath his nose.
Alfie spat on the ground near my head and said, "All right, then. Up on your feet."
The woman, glaring at me, said, "The nasty thing. I ought to stick him with this anyway." She waved something in her hand, something metallic that glinted. She was heavyset, fifty-ish, as poorly dressed as the others, and with a round sullen face framed by stringy hair.
She made a move as though to attack me, but the old man clutched at her arm, saying, "Don't, Tina! Let's be off, let's be away from here!"
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"He killed my boy," she cried, outraged, and shook the old man off.
Alfie, though, stopped her, saying, "Never mind that. He's right, we've got to get going." To me he said, "I told you to get up."
Laboriously, I rolled over onto my stomach and pushed myself up onto hands and knees. I was weak, and stiff, and shaken, but behaved as though I were much worse off than that. I was grasping at every advantage, however slight, and it seemed to me there was an advantage in being stronger than they knew.
When I finally got to my feet I saw that we were in the middle of the road between the lean-to and the metal shack across the way in which the assassins had lain in wait. I stood swaying, tottering, only half faking my dizziness and weakness, and Alfie approached me with a thick coarse rope, one end of which had been formed into a loop like a hangman's noose. As the older couple stood well out of the way, the woman pointing my own pistol at me, Alfie put the loop over my head and told me, "Now, you be good and give us no trouble. Don't make it no worse on yourself."
Til pay you," I said. "Take me to Ice, to the tower. I've got money there; I'll pay more than the slavers."
"You must think I'm simple," Alfie said, and smiled upon me, and backed away, letting the length of rope slide through his hands until he reached the other end of it. The rope was about ten feet long, connecting us. He looped the other end around his wrist.
"I give you my word," I said, though I knew it wouldn't do any good.
He didn't even bother to answer. "Follow them," he said. "Not too close. And watch yourself."
He meant Tina and the old man. They started off down the street now, looking back to see if I was coming. I hesitated, but I saw Alfie's face harden, and knew there was nothing to do but obey. I started off, stumbling, forced by the hobble to take short scuffling steps, and followed where Tina and the old man led. Behind me, at the far end of the rope around my neck, came Alfie.
My head drooped, from weariness and from frustration. I found myself looking at my hands, hanging useless from the
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ropes tying my wrists together, and I saw the dark red marks on my finger where the youth had bitten me. But I didn't see Gar's ring.
I raised my head, startled, and inadvertently took a longer step than the hobble would permit, and lost my balance. I thought I'd strangle when the rope around my neck grew taut, but when I hit the ground the tension lessened. I lay there gasping.
Alfie called, "Get up! Get up, you!" And tugged at the rope.
It was harder to get to my feet this time. I couldn't feign weakness greater than I actually felt. But I finally did attain my feet again, and the couple in front started off once more, and I followed them.
The ring? I could see it. It glinted in the light of Hell, ahead of me, on the hand of the woman, Tina. I ground my teeth at that, and very nearly gave in to a despairing fury.
But I held myself in check, as I had learned to do in the prison. I could see there was nothing to be done. They were all too far away, and I was bound too tightly. Besides, there was the weakness and stiffness all over my body. If I'd been stronger I might have tried attacking Alfie anyway, since I knew disabling him would stop or at least slow the other two, but not the way I was now. All I could do was scuff forward, led like a dog on a leash, and hope for a better chance later on.
As we moved away from the immediate area of the shooting we began to see people again, living their lives, moving about, traveling from here to there. None of them paid any attention to us as we passed in our slow parade, the woman and the old man ambling along in front and then me shuffling in their wake and at last Alfie bringing up the rear like the master of hounds. This caravan, impossible anywhere else in civilization, was normal on Anarchaos. No one would come to my aid, no one would question my imprisonment, not here in the ultimate land of the rugged individualist. I was alone.
And I had lost.
XV
I cannot tell how much time went by. Weeks. Months.
If a man is treated like an animal, he will become an animal. There is something inside every human being that craves mindlessness, that aches to give up the nagging responsibility of being a creature with a rational brain, that yearns to be merely instinct and appetite and blindness. Those who join a rioting mob have given in to this animality within themselves; alcoholics and drug addicts are perpetually in search of it.
I became an animal. I became as stupid, as obedient, as
unthinking, as placid as any plowhorse. ,
The early part of the transition is clear, but the last of the decline blends into unending sameness: the straw of my bed, the damp darkness of the mine, the looming mountains, Hell at perpetual evening on the western rim of the sky.
Alfie and the other two didn't keep me long. They walked me to a large wooden building, one story high but rambling, apparently a kind of meeting house or place for the bartering of goods. Here they sold me to two heavily-bearded men in clothing made of furs, who bound me even more tightly than the others had and dumped me into the back of a rough-made wagon with two other new slaves. A fourth was tossed in after us later on, and then we rode out of Ulik, our two captors sitting together at the front of the wagon, calling to their hairhorses and talking together in guttural voices.
I passed out from time to time, and was probably unconscious for most of the trip. At the end of it, one of the two climbed into the back of the wagon, cut the ropes off us, and threw us one at a time out onto the ground, where we were all at first too weak to move. But they forced us to stand up, kicking us and pulling our hair, until finally three of us were on our feet. The fourth turned out to be dead, which enraged them. One of them, in his fury, beat at the dead body with a rock until the other one told him he was wasting time. Then they marched us through rocks and granite and sharp projections to a wooden fence. A man in a green uniform gave them money there and they went away. I watched the
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transaction, though I was too dazed then to fully understand it.
The light was more Earthlike here, with Hell far away on the horizon, but the landscape was forbidding and unnatural. Jagged rocks and boulders were everywhere; shale rustled beneath one's feet; the sharp teeth of hills and mountains sprang up on all sides. Much of this had been cleared and flattened inside the compound, in the area circumscribed by that wooden fence. We were marched, the three of us, across the compound to a shed, where we were examined by a doctor.