The evening meal was simple but palatable: slices of dry spiced meat, a salad of raw vegetables, insect paste, pickles, soft white wine from a green glass demijohn. The passengers ate in wary silence; on Tschai strangers were objects of instinctive suspicion. The captain had no such inhibitions. He ate and drank with gusto and regaled the company with witticisms, reminiscences of previous voyages, jocular guesses regarding each passenger's purpose in making the voyage: a performance which gradually thawed the atmosphere. Ylin-Ylan ate little. She appraised the two orange-haired girls and became gloomily aware of their appealing fragility. Dordolio sat somewhat apart, paying little heed to the captain's conversation, but from time to time looking sidewise toward the two girls and preening his mustache. After the meal he conducted Ylin-Ylan forward to the bow where they watched phosphorescent sea-eels streaking away from the oncoming bow. The others sat on benches along the high quarterdeck, conducting guarded conversations while pink Az and blue Braz rose, one immediately behind the other, to send a pair of trails across the water.
One by one the passengers drifted off to their cabins, and presently the ship was left to the helmsman and the lookout.
Days drifted past: cool mornings with a pearly smoke clinging to the sea; noons with Carina 4269 burning at the zenith; ale-colored afternoons; quiet nights.
The Vargaz touched briefly at two small ports along the coast of Horasin: villages submerged in the foliage of giant gray-green trees. The Vargaz discharged hides and metal implements, took aboard bales of nuts, lumps of jellied fruit, butts of a beautiful rose and black timber.
Departing Horasin the Vargaz veered out into the Draschade Ocean, steering dead east along the equator both to take advantage of the counter-current and to avoid unfavorable weather patterns to north and south.
Winds were fickle; the Vargaz wallowed lazily across almost imperceptible swells.
The passengers amused themselves in their various ways. The orange-haired girls Heizari and Edwe played quoits, and teased Traz until he also joined the game.
Reith introduced the group to shuffleboard, which was taken up with enthusiasm.
Palo Barba, the father of the girls, declared himself an instructor of swordsmanship; he and Dordolio fenced an hour or so each day, Dordolio stripped to the waist, a black ribbon confining his hair. Dordolio performed with foot-stamping bravura and staccato exclamations. Palo Barba fenced less flamboyantly, but with great emphasis upon traditional postures. Reith occasionally watched the two at their bouts, and on one occasion accepted Palo Barba's invitation to fence. Reith found the foils somewhat long and over-flexible, but conducted himself without discredit. He noticed Dordolio making critical observations to Ylin-Ylan, and later Traz, who had overhead, informed him that Dordolio had pronounced his technique naive and eccentric.
Reith shrugged and grinned. Dordolio was a man Reith found impossible to take seriously.
Twice other sails were spied in the distance; on one occasion a long black motor-galley changed course in a sinister fashion.
Reith inspected the vessel through his scanscope. A dozen tall yellow skinned men wearing complicated black turbans stood looking toward the Vargaz. Reith reported as much to the captain, who made a casual glance. "Pirates. They won't bother us: too much risk."
The galley passed a mile to the south, then turned and disappeared into the southwest.
Two days later an island appeared ahead: a mountainous hump with foreshore cloaked under tall trees. "Gozed," said the captain, in response to Reith's inquiry. "We'll put in for a day or so. You've never touched at Gozed?"
"Never."
"You have a surprise in store. Or then, on the other hand" here the captain gave Reith a careful inspection-"perhaps you don't. I can't say, since the customs of your own land are unknown to me. And unknown to yourself perhaps? I understand you to be an amnesiac."
Reith made a deprecatory gesture. "I never dispute other people's opinions of myself."
"In itself, a bizarre custom," declared the captain. "Try as I may, I cannot decide the land of your birth. You are a sort strange to me."
"I am a wanderer," said Reith. "A nomad, if you like."
"For a wanderer, you are at times strangely ignorant. Well then, ahead lies Gozed."
The island bulked large against the sky. Looking through the scanscope Reith could see an area along the foreshore where the trees had been defoliated and trimmed to the condition of crooked poles, each supporting one, two or three round huts. The ground below was barren gray sand, clear of refuse and raked smooth. Anacho the Dirdirman inspected the village through the scanscope. "About what I expected."
"You are acquainted with Gozed? The captain made quite a mystery of the place."
"No mystery. The folk of the island are highly religious; they worship the sea-scorpions native to the waters around the island. They are as large or larger than a man, or so I am told."
"Why then are the huts so high in the air?"
"At night the scorpions come up from the sea to spawn, which they accomplish by stinging eggs into a host animal, often a woman left down on the beach for that purpose. The eggs hatch, the 'Mother of the Gods' is devoured by the larvae. In the last stages, when pain and religious ecstasy produce a curious psychological state in the 'Mother; she runs down the beach and flings herself into the sea."
"An unsettling religion."
The Dirdirman admitted as much. "Still it appears to suit the folk of Gozed.
They could change anytime they chose. Sub-men are notoriously susceptible to aberrations of this sort."
Reith could not restrain a grin, and Anacho examined him with surprise. "May I inquire the source of your amusement?"
"It occurs to me that the relationship of Dirdirmen to Dirdir is not unlike that of the Gozed toward their scorpions."
"I fail to see the analogy," Anacho declared rather stiffly.
"Simplicity itself: both are victims to non-human beings who use men for their particular needs."
"Bah!" muttered Anacho. "In many ways you are the most wrongheaded man alive."
He walked abruptly aft, to stand staring out over the sea. Pressures were working in Anacho's subconscious, thought Reith, causing him uneasiness.
The Vargaz nosed cautiously in toward the beach, swung behind a jut of barnacle-encrusted rock and dropped anchor. The captain went ashore in a pinnace; the passengers saw him talking to a group of sternfaced men, white-skinned, totally naked save for sandals and fillets holding down their long iron-colored hair.
Agreement was reached; the captain returned to the Vargaz. A half hour later a pair of lighters came out to the boat. A boom was rigged; bales of fiber and coils of rope were brought aboard, other bales and crates were lowered to the lighters. Two hours after arriving at Gozed the Vargaz backed sail, hoisted anchor and set off across the Draschade.
After the evening meal the passengers sat on the deck forward of the sterncastle with a lantern swinging overhead, and the talk veered to the people of Gozed and their religion. Val Dal Barba, wife of Palo Barba, mother of Heizari and Edwe, thought the ritual unjust.
"Why are there only 'Mothers of Gods'? Why shouldn't those flintfaced men go down on the beach and become 'Fathers of Gods'?"
The captain chuckled. "It seems as if the honors are reserved for the ladies."
"It would never be thus in Murgen," declared the merchant warmly. "We pay sizable tithes to the priests; they take all responsibility for appeasing Bisme; we have no further inconvenience."
"A system as sensible as any," agreed Pal Barba. "This year we subscribe to the Pansogmatic Gnosis, and the religion has much virtue to it."