The smithy considered. "I would not have believed it! You want this to play?"
Neq nodded.
"Price was not my objection. I see you would have trouble playing the glockenspiel in the wilderness, unless it were attached. Yes. It could be done... I would have to coat the blade with an adhesive... but you would never be able to fight again. Do you realize that?"
They bargained, and it was done. He became Neq the Glockenspiel.
"A what?' Vara demanded, surprised and suspicious. "You have beaten your sword into a what?'
"A glockenspiel. A percussion instrument. My sword was too bloody."
She faced away angrily. Tyl smiled.
They traveled south and east. Tyl and Neq were returning to make their report to Dr. Jones. Vara, though she did not see it that way, was that report. She was the only one remaining who could answer the necessary questions about the nature of Helicon's demise. But she thought she was coming to have her vengeance on Neq; she did not mean to let him escape.
Tyl did not start any conversations. Neq hardly felt like talking himself, and Vara remained sullen. They had about three thousand miles to go: between three and four months at their swift pace. It was not likely to be a pleasant trip.
But they had to work together, for the natives were generally unfriendly and the old hostels no longer existed even in the formal crazy demesnes. They were cutting across what had been known as western Canada, intending to skirt the southern boundaries of a series of large lakes, and the northern boundaries of the worst badlands. Tyl had a crazy map; it claimed such a route existed.
Someone had to forage each day for food; someone had to stand guard each night; someone had to get them safely through outlaw territories. Tyl did most of it at first. Then Vara, shamed, began to help.
Neq, stripped of his sword, could neither fight nor forage effectively. He was dependent on the other two, and mortified by the situation. It was hard to give up a weapon, and not merely in the circle! All he could do was keep watch--and for that he had to stay awake. That was not easy after a twelve hour hike, each day.
One night as they camped by a river, Neq consoled himself by striking the tip of his pincers against the bells of his glockenspiel. He had not tried to play it since leaving the smithy's shop. But the sound was not proper; metal on metal annoyed him. He took the little wooden hammer and tapped the notes experimentally, regaining the feel of the music. Soon he was running through the scales, improving his competence while the others slept. It was possible to play entire melodies with no more than the hammer! He began to hum, measuring his voice against the clear tones of the instrument. It was there in him yet: the joy of music.
Finally he unstopped the voice that had been dormant during the entire time of killing, and that had emerged only when his sword was buried. He sang, accompanying himself carefully on the glockenspieclass="underline"
He sang all of it, though this was not that river and his voice, despite the smithy's compliment, was imperfect now, a creaky shadow of its prime. But the instrument gave him a certainty of key he had not had before, and the spirit of the melody suffused him with its odd rapture.
As he sang, he rocked to the lovely, tortured vision of it: the young woman taking a walk by the river strand, refusing to marry the suiter, being threatened by his knife at her breast, and finally drowned. An ugly story but a beautiful song--one of his favorites, before he had come too close to living it. There were tears in his eyes, making his watch difficult.
"Your wife--did you kill her too?"
He was not startled to find Vara awake. He had known he could not sing aloud without arousing her curiosity or ire. "I must have."
"I ask only because I have to," she said bitterly. "Tyl balked me, on pain I should know you. Before I kill you. I saw you had no bracelet."
"She was a crazy," he said, not caring what she might think about Neqa.
"A crazy! What have you to do with them?"
"I thought to rebuild Helicon."
"You lie!" she cried, clutching at her sticks, which were always with her, warrior-style.
Neq looked at her tiredly. "I kill. I do not lie."
She turned away. "I may not kill you yet."
"You want the mountain dead?"
"No!"
"Then tell me: what is Helicon to you? Were you not kept prisoner there, and betrayed at the end? Don't you hate it yet?"
"Helicon was my home! I loved it!"
He studied her in the moonlight, perplexed. "Do you want it restored, then, as I do?"
"No! Yes!" she cried, crying.
Neq let it be. He knew what grief was, and the burning for revenge. And futility. Vara was in the throes of it all, as he had been when Neqa died. As he was still. It might be months, years before she made sense to others or to herself, and she would not be so pretty, then.
He tapped the flat metal bells of the glockenspiel again, picking out a new tune. Then he sang, and Vara did not protest.
"I know my love by her way of walking And I know my love by her way of talking..."
Tyl slept on, though their conversation was not quiet.
"When I first saw Var," Vara said, "he was standing on the plateau of Mt. Muse, looking down from the rim. He could have dropped a rock on me, but he didn't, because he wasn't the kind to take advantage."
"Why should anyone drop a rock on you?" Neq demanded, disliking this reference to the dead man.
"We were meeting in single combat. You know that,"
"Why did Bob send a child?" Was the truth at last within reach?
"And after we fought, it was cold, and he held me so I would not shiver. He gave me his heat, for he was always generous."
They were working at cross purposes.
"Would you warm your enemy if he were cold?" she asked him.
"No."
"You see. Var was a giver of life, not of death."
She had meant to hurt him, and she had succeeded. How could he return to this bitter girl what he had taken from her?
"Ambush," Tyl murmured. "Well-laid; I saw it too late. You two break while I cover the retreat."
Neither Neq or Vara reacted openly; both were too well versed in tactics. They exchanged a glance of chagrin, for neither had been aware of the situation. But if Tyl said there was an ambush, there was an ambush, though the forest seemed deserted.
Vara turned nonchalantly and started back. Neq shrugged and followed, while Tyl whistled idly and moved toward a tree as though for a call of nature. But it was too late; the trap sprung, and they were neatly in it.
From front, back and sides armed men appeared and converged. They carried clubs and staffs and sticks. No blades, oddly. Now Neq understood how the three had walked into the trap: the ambushers came out of holes in the ground! The trapdoors were flush with the forest floor and covered with leaves so that nothing showed until they opened.
But this was a great deal of trouble for a mere ambush! And no sharp weapons! Why?
Tyl and Vera had run together the moment the men appeared. Now they stood back to back, sticks in each hand. Neq remained where he was; his first abortive motion to uncover his sword had reminded him that he was no longer armed. If he joined the other two he would only hamper them.
The men closed in. Neq remembered the similar maneuver of a tribe six years before, closing in on a truck. If he could have known in time to save Neqa... !