The priest thrust a great thumb searchingly up one nostril and spoke with his gaze steady over his fist. ‘We shall not go alone. Four others come with us, picked men. I have been preparing for this for some while, and all is now ready. You are discontented, your woman is taken: what have you to lose? I strongly advise you to come — for your own sake, of course — although it will suit me to have someone about with a weak will and a hunter’s eye.’
‘Who are the four others, Marapper?’
‘I will tell you that when you say you are coming. If I were betrayed to the Guards, they would slit all our throats — mine especially! — in twenty places.’
‘What are we going to do? Where are we going?’
Marapper rose slowly to his feet and stretched. With long fingers he raked through his hair, making at the same time the most hideous sneer he could devise, twisting the two great slabs of his cheeks, one up, one down, until his mouth coiled between them like knotted rope.
‘Go by yourself, Roy, if you so distrust my leadership! Why, you’re like a woman, all bellyache and questioning. I’ll tell you no more, except that my scheme is something too grand for your comprehension. Domination of the ship! That’s it! Nothing less! Complete domination of the ship — you don’t even know what the phrase means.’
Cowed by the priest’s ferocious visage, Complain merely said, ‘I was not going to refuse to come.’
‘You mean you will come?’
‘Yes.’
Marapper gripped his arm fervently, without a word. His cheeks gleamed.
‘Now tell me who the other four are who come with us,’ Complain said, alarmed the moment he had committed himself.
Marapper released his arm.
‘You know the old saying, Roy: the truth never set anyone free. You will learn soon enough. It is better that I do not tell you now. I plan we shall start early next sleep. Now I shall leave you; I have work still to do. Not a word to anyone.’
Half out of the door, he paused. Thrusting a hand into his tunic, he pulled something out and waved it triumphantly. Complain recognized it as a looker, the collection of reading matter used by the extinct Giants.
‘This is our key to power!’ Marapper said dramatically, thrusting it back into its place of concealment. Then he closed the door behind him.
Idle as statuary, Complain stood in the centre of the floor, only his head working. And in his head there was only a circle of thought, leading nowhere. But Marapper was the priest, Marapper had knowledge most others could not share, Marapper must lead. Belatedly, Complain went to the door, opened it and peered out.
The priest had already gone from sight. Nobody was near except Meller, the bearded artist. He was painting a bright fresco on the corridor wall outside his room, dabbing on with shrewdly engrossed face the various dyes he had collected the sleep-wake before. Beneath his hand, a great cat launched itself up the wall. He did not notice Complain.
It was growing late. Complain went to eat in the almost deserted Mess. He fed in a trance. He returned, and Meller was still painting in a trance. He shut his door and prepared slowly for bed. Gwenny’s grey dress still hung on a hook by the bed; he snatched it down suddenly and flung it out of sight behind a cupboard. Then he lay down and let silence prolong itself.
Suddenly into the room burst Marapper, bulbously, monumentally out of breath. He slammed the door behind him, gasping and tugging the corner of his cloak which had caught in the jamb.
‘Hide me, Roy — quick! Quickly, don’t stare, you fool. Get up, get your knife out. The Guards’ll be here, Zilliac’ll be here. They’re after me. They’d massacre poor old priests as soon as look at them.’
As he spoke, he ran to Complain’s bunk, swung it out from the wall and began to crouch behind it.
‘What have you done?’ Complain demanded. ‘Why are they after you? Why hide here? Why drag me into it?’
‘It’s no compliment. You just happened to be near and my legs were never constructed for running. My life’s in danger.’
While he was talking, Marapper stared wildly about, as if for a better hiding place, and then evidently decided to stay where he was. By adjusting a blanket over the far side of the bed he was screened from the doorway.
‘They must have seen me come in here,’ he said. ‘It’s not that I care for my own skin, but I’ve got plans. I let one of the Guards in on this scheme of ours and he went straight in and told it to Zilliac.’
‘Why should I—’ Complain began hotly. A scuffle outside gave them the briefest warning and then the door was hurled open, rebounding on its hinges. It missed Complain by inches only, for he stood half behind it.
The crisis powered his inspiration. Flinging both hands over his face, he bent forward, groaning loudly and staggering, making believe the edge of the door had struck him. Through his fingers he saw Zilliac, the Lieutenant’s right-hand man, next in line for the lieutenancy, burst into the room and kick the door shut behind him. He glared contemptuously at Complain.
‘Hold your filthy row, man,’ Zilliac shouted. ‘Where’s the priest? I saw him come in here.’
As he turned, dazer ready, to survey the room, Complain whipped up Gwenny’s wooden stool by one leg and brought it down at the base of Zilliac’s skull, square across the tense neck. A delightful splintering sound of wood and bone, and Zilliac toppled full length. He had barely hit the deck before Marapper stood up. With a heave, all teeth showing, he tipped the heavy bunk over sideways, sending it falling across the fallen man.
‘I’ve got him!’ the priest exclaimed. ‘Hem’s guts, I’ve got him!’ He gathered up Zilliac’s dazer, moving with agility for a heavy man, and faced the door.
‘Open up, Roy! There’ll doubtless be others outside, and it’s now or never if we’re getting out of this with breathable throats.’
But the door swung open at that moment without Complain’s aid. Meller the artist stood there, sheathing a knife, his face pale as boiled fowl.
‘Here’s an offering for you, priest,’ he said. ‘I’d better bring him in before someone comes along.’
He grabbed the ankles of a guard who lay crumpled in the corridor. Complain went to his aid, and together they dragged the limp body in and closed the door. Meller leaned against the wall mopping his forehead.
‘I don’t know what you’re up to, priest,’ he said, ‘but when this fellow heard the rumpus in here, he was off to fetch his friends. I thought it looked most convenient to despatch him before you had a party.’
‘May he make the Long Journey in peace,’ Marapper said weakly. ‘It was well done, Meller. Indeed, we’ve all done well for amateurs.’
‘I have a throwing blade,’ Meller explained. ‘Fortunately — for I dislike hand-to-hand fighting. Mind if I sit down?’
Moving dazedly, Complain knelt between the bodies and felt for a heart beat. Directly action had started, the ordinary Complain had been shuffled away for another, an automatic man with defter movement and sure impulse. He it was who took over when the hunt was on. Now his hand searched Zilliac and the crumpled Guard and found there was no pulse between the two of them.
Death was as common as cockroaches in the small tribes. ‘Death is the longest part of a man’, said a folk poem. This stretched-out spectacle, so frequently met with, was the subject of much of the Teaching: there had to be a formal way of dealing with it. It was fearful, and fear must not be allowed to lodge in a man. The automatic man in Complain, confronted with death now, fell straight into the first gesture of prostration, as he had been brought up to do.
Seeing their cue, Marapper and Meller instantly joined him, Marapper crying softly aloud. Only when their intricate business was over and the last Long Journey said did they lapse back into something like normality.