“A gastronomic catastrophe,” McCoy muttered, wrinkling his nose.
“De gustibus no disputandem,” Kirk said with a grin.
“What does that mean?” Sara asked.
“‘Of taste there is no disputing.’ It’s an old language, Latin. But let’s get back to the business at hand. Vembe is obviously no friend of Gara’s. Tell him that Chag committed a horrible crime in our home country and is under sentence of death by torture. Tell him we’ve journeyed many months over the seas to carry out the sentence, but we can’t until we find him.”
The woman made a quick translation. When she finished, the old hillman gave a grunt of satisfaction, started to speak, then halted. He stared down into the fire pit for a moment and then cocked his head, muttering something.
“What’s he saying?” Kirk demanded impatiently.
“I think he’s putting the bite on us. He says he’s getting old and his memory isn’t what it used to be.”
Kirk took the pouch of Kyrosian coins from his belt and handed it to the woman.
“Pay him what’s necessary. We’ll wait outside.”
Ducking their heads, and hurrying to be out of the stench, the two exited through the small door. Moving away from the odor that seemed to follow them like a rolling fog bank, they both took deep, appreciative lung-fulls of fresh air. A moment later Sara joined them. She handed Kirk a much-depleted purse, and shouldered a neelot-skin bag.
“This way,” she said, and started diagonally across the market square.
“I hope that’s not what I think it is,” McCoy said, prodding the bag she carried as they wove their way through the crowd.
“Prime vris,” Sara said as she turned her nose away from the bag. “Old Vembe’s hill code wouldn’t let him take a bribe. But he found nothing in it against selling me ten kilos at three times the going rate. At least now, though, we know where Chag Gara lives. It’s not too far from here.”
She stepped through the narrow spaces between the closely grouped buildings heading back in the direction they had come.
“Anybody in the mood for vris?”
Kirk and McCoy stared at her and shook their heads in a vigorous negative.
“Somehow, I thought that’s what you gentlemen would say,” she grimaced and heaved the bag onto a pile of trash.
Twenty minutes later, after walking down the slope leading to the western sea’s bay, they paused near the edge of a marsh. The salty tang in the air from the wind-borne sea spray tingled their nostrils. They breathed it in deeply, flushing out the last remnants of the stench of the vris. The bay and the sea were visible beyond the marsh, tinged a deep blue, almost violet, by the rays of Kyr.
Only one kind of vegetation seemed to be growing in the marsh. Barrel-shaped plants with five or six slender, spiky leaves jutting from their tops and jiggling in a gentle land breeze, made a mat that glowed golden-yellow in the sun’s rays. Among the plants moved harvesters, who tore off the leaves and piled them on sledges they dragged through the mud behind them.
“Jakim,” George explained. “Lumber is scarce in Andros, and once those leaves are processed, they can be woven into mats that are almost as strong as steel.”
She looked around as if searching for a landmark and then, nodding with satisfaction, stepped off to the right. A few minutes later, she led the way into a narrow, winding street. Soon the smell of vris was in the air again. Sara explained that they were in the section of the city inhabited almost solely by exiled hillmen. The street wasn’t paved, and an evil-smelling sewer meandered down its center. Sara in the lead, they picked their way down a walkway made of jakim mats, stepping over piles of trash and broken crockery. From somewhere in the distance came the sound of angry, drunken voices and a woman’s scream.
Only half of the mud-walled, dome-shaped, single dwellings seemed to be inhabited. The sky could be seen through barred windows in some of the homes where the roofs had fallen in. Ragged, emaciated children played on weed-covered plots among the rubble of collapsed walls.
“Poor devils,” McCoy muttered softly. “Any system that forces people to live like this should be changed.”
“You’re right, Bones,” Kirk agreed, “but it isn’t our place to change it and Spock’s way would only make things worse. Planets like Kyros have to be allowed to find their own way in their own time. That’s why we have General Order One.”
Ensign George paused suddenly and pointed across the street.
“I think this is it,” she said. “Vembe told me it would be a small house on the left with a red and black door directly across from a wine shop. This is the wine shop…” she gestured to the building behind them. “… and that seems to be the only place which fits the description.” Turning to Kirk, the ensign asked, “What now?”
Kirk peered at Chag Gara’s dwelling for a moment, then said, “From what we know of Gara’s proclivities, he’d be more likely to let a woman alone in, rather than one accompanied by a pair of men. If Dr. McCoy gives you the hypo, do you think you can handle Gara? We’ll be right outside in case of trouble.”
“Trust my dop,” Sara said, giving a confident nod. “She can handle any man.”
“Bones…” Kirk said. McCoy handed Sara the hypo and she slipped it into her chiton. She picked her way across the muddy street, soiling her slippers in the process. When she raised her hand to knock on the red and black striped door, a strange metamorphosis took place. Simply standing before the solid door, she became wanton and provocative.
“Can that be our prim Sara?” Kirk whispered to McCoy. “I think I’d like to meet that dop of hers.”
McCoy nodded agreement. Sara knocked, waited, and then knocked again, cocking her head as if listening for movement inside. There was no response.
“Asleep, or out?” Kirk muttered.
She turned and beckoned to them. They picked their way across the street and joined her at the door. Kirk made a gesture for silence, seized a projecting wooden lever, raised it carefully, then in one swift movement, flung open the door.
“Inside!”
They burst into a deserted building.
A rickety table stood in the center of the small, dusty one-room dwelling. On it was a dirty plate, a pottery jug, and an empty wine cup. An old crate beside it served as a chair. The walls were bare except for a frayed and worn hill robe that hung from a peg. To one side, a cot-like bed was overturned and a coarsely woven mattress had tumbled to the floor.
“Too late…” Sara murmured.
Kirk gazed around the house saying nothing for a few moments. He walked to the overturned bed and prodded the mattress with one foot. “Spock has him,” he said finally. “That’s obvious. The only question is…where?”
Sighing, he walked to the open door of Gara’s hovel. Directly across the street, a small group of hill people arrived at the wine shop. Two women separated themselves from the group and sat to one side of the wide-open entrance. The men went in.
“Maybe… maybe someone over there saw what happened and which direction Spock took,” Kirk said. “Let’s check it out.”
“I don’t think I can go,” Sara said dubiously. “It’s taboo for women to drink in hill wine shops. Vris is one thing; wine is something else again.”
“It’s even taboo for women like your dop?” McCoy asked.
Sara nodded. Kirk shrugged. “All they can do is throw us out.”
They started across the narrow street, stepping carefully to avoid the worst of the muck, when a sudden hubbub of angry voices came from within the wine shop. A giant of a man in a fiery red mask, followed by an angry hillman waving a piece of slate, came charging out of the wine shop holding a small, roly-poly Kyrosian by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his pants. The large man gave a tremendous heave, and the little man went flying through the air, landing with a soggy splat in the noisome, garbage-laden streamlet in the center of the street.