The chief walked over to her, put his hands on her shoulders. Barch charged forward, stopped a great open-handed slap. He punched, felt the numb jar of blows. Lamps, walls, fires, faces became a meaningless backdrop. The red face was intent, the nostrils flared. Barch twisted the face askew with a haymaker; the face twisted back without change of expression. Barch felt his wind going, his legs felt like logs, he could hardly raise his arms. "Ellen," he croaked, "grab a rock, brain him…"
Komeitk Lelianr pressed back against the wall, turned her face away. Three great blows hit Barch. The first was like a lead hammer and the lights faded. The second was like a dark surf washing over him, the third was a rumble of distant thunder.
Barch awoke on a pile of skins. He sat up, feeling his face. It was puffy and ached dully. At a long table across the room three or four women pounded meal in stone mortars.
At the end sat Komeitk Lelianr. She rose to her feet, bent over a pot, came to Barch with a crockery bowl. "Drink this and you'll feel better."
Barch started to speak, but the words choked in his throat. He took the bowl, drank. Komeitk Lelianr stood watching. Barch stared at her coldly. "How're you making out with the chief?"
"Clet?" She shrugged.
"You speak his same language I notice."
"It's a common tongue that everyone knows."
Barch handed back the bowl, turned his head to the wall. A few minutes later he rose to his feet, staggered outside, leaned against the cliff, vomited.
Raising his head again, he saw a pair of gray men skirting the hillside, carrying a basket between them. Behind came Clet, the Podruod chief, a beast the size of a boar slung over his shoulder. His eyes fixed impassively on Barch, he strode inside the cave.
Barch settled himself upon a rock, rubbed his aching head. After a moment he raised his eyes, studied the expanse of the valley. It was shaped roughly like the Mediterranean Sea, with the cave at a position comparable to Libya. High mountains ringed the Levantine end; at Gibraltar the river cut through a narrow steep-walled notch; along the Cote d'Azur he noticed the entrance to a second valley. Directly opposite the cave, in the position of Italy, a great round-knobbed bluff reared up to dominate the valley. Strange, thought Barch, that the Klau maintain no fort up there. Looking closely he thought to see the outline of ruins.
Overcast scudded low over the mountains; a few drops of rain fell. Barch rose to his feet, shivered as a cold blast of wind penetrated the threadbare Modok garment.
He looked tentatively toward the entrance into the cave. The two men with the basket now sat beside it husking a kind of nut. One of them snapped his fingers at Barch, motioned.
Barch glowered, half-turned away. But, he decided, he would look less of a fool working than refusing to work. He could always leave the cave-but why should he? He was free; he was fed and sheltered; there was no reason for him to go. Barch sat down, began hulling nuts.
Weeks passed, two, three, a month. Barch mastered the simple routines of the tribe, gained a smattering of the common tongue. On several occasions he went hunting, and once killed a large, brown, two-legged creature like a hybrid of kangaroo and lizard, for which we was warmly congratulated.
He explored the cave. Four different passages opened out of the community hall. Two struck off more or less horizontally, winding through small chambers, nooks, niches and alcoves wherein the tribesmen slept. A third led down past Clet's chamber, dropping into the depths under the mountain. The fourth served as a flue for the fire, led up into an enormous space over the hall called Big Hole. At one end, where the wall was barely a shell, daylight seeped in through a fissure. Stalactites hung, stalagmites rose, occasionally joining to form spindly columns of fascinating height. In Big Hole, Barch arranged his bed of humus and rudely cured hides.
The tribe numbered thirty-four: twenty-one men, ten women, three doubtfuls. These last were the Calbyssinians: Armian, Ardl, Arn, whose sex was a frantically guarded secret. They were slight, pretty creatines with melting blue eyes and purple-gold hair. They bundled themselves in loose cloaks, and spent all their leisure time trying to probe out each other's secret. Their hints, wiles, sly strategies provided Barch with almost his only amusement.
In addition to the Calbyssinians, there were four Byathids: three tall pink men with foxy eyes, droopy noses, silky cinnamon-colored hair; one pink raw-boned woman with a voice like a sheep.
There was Kerbol and his dour woman, stocky and gray-green, with pointed heads and frog-like faces.
There were three hatchet-faced Splangs with skins like Cordovan leather: Chevrr, Skurr and a thin beetle-faced woman that they shared.
There were two Griffits, cat-like men with watchful, sidelong eyes, stiff mustaches and an air of vindictive truculence that never quite manifested itself.
There was a large brown man who had lost his nose; his name was Flatface. He controlled two bald and bad-tempered women of unguessable race.
There was Pedratz, taffy-colored and smelling of musk, with eyebrows that rose into fantastic horns. There was Moranko, a sullenly handsome youth who hated Clet and presently Barch. There was the dwarf, Moses, with a punchinello face and skin like a piebald horse.
There were six of the bulldog-faced Modoks; four men and two women. They crouched by themselves at the back of the hall, watching everything with wide, suspicious eyes.
There was Sl, a white-skinned man with white bifurcated beard and split nose who did everything double; there was the musician, Lkandeli Szet. There was Barch; there was Komeitk Lelianr; there was Clet and his two women: a pair of young nondescripts who had been the original property of Lkandeli Szet.
Making a mental inventory, Barch estimated that at least fifteen races from as many worlds occupied the cave. Sitting quietly at the back bench, he considered the melange with wry amusement. Never would it be said that his life had been uneventful or drab.
On Earth no one even suspected the existence of Magarak. And yet by this time… With a queasiness in his stomach, he speculated on the Klau raid. What had been their purpose?
Across the hall the voices of Flatface's two bald women rose in acrimony. Clet, at the big table in front of the fire, raised his bony red head; the bickering quieted. Clet disliked noise. Here was one reason, thought Barch, for the fact that the tribe so widely disparate in background could live in comparative amity. Another lay in the fundamental nature of their existence, a kind of cultural least-common-denominator, a stage through which each of the races had passed. For Barch, that stage had been only three or four thousand years in the past. He glanced at Komeitk Lelianr, who sat drawing aimless patterns on the table with her fingers. How long had it been since her ancestors lived in caves? A hundred thousand years? A million?
She looked clean and fresh, Barch noticed. Her face was thinner; her mouth had lost something of its girlish curve. Her expression was abstracted, distant, the result of a stoic or fatalistic characterization, no doubt.
Barch rose to his feet, went outside into the darkness. Mist that was not quite drizzle dampened his face. Against the blurred gray of the limestone cliff he noticed a dark shape. His heart stopped for an instant, then started again. It was Kerbol, whom nature had endowed with a skin the color of wet rock, pop-eyes, a mouth like a flap. Barch remembered that Kerbol grumbled about the heat in the hall and seemed to enjoy the cool dampness of the valley.
Barch went to stand beside him; any man that preferred the solitude of the valley to the hall seemed an ally.
Kerbol grunted, and after a moment said in a deep rumbling voice, "The mist falls, the wind blows backwards down Palkwarkz Ztvo. Tomorrow the sky will be high and then the Klau come hunting. Tomorrow will be a good day to stay close by the cave."