“What about the rest of us?” Kirk asked. “Spock isn’t exactly unfamiliar with our faces.”
“Ready to wear,” Scott replied, pointing to some grotesque masks on the bunk beside him.
Chekov’s voice called from outside. “Captain, somebody’s coming from the direction of the Messiah’s tent. It looks like Tram Bir.”
It was.
“Hurry,” he said as he came out of the darkness. “You’re to entertain the Messiah. When I described what he might expect, he became most interested.” Anxiously, he added, “She will do as well as she did last night, won’t she?”
“Better,” Kirk promised.
It took them only a few minutes to get ready. The men wore flowing cloaks made of a patchwork of multicolored furs with collars of bristling orange feathers. Kirk’s mask was a neelot’s head; Chekov’s, an exaggerated clan-style hood with a pointed top from which sprouted more orange feathers. McCoy and Scott wore the heads of antlered, deer-like animals.
Kirk slung a Beshwa drum over one shoulder as McCoy and Chekov took up their thirty-seven stringed instruments. Scott experimented with a Kyrosian horn that curved from the mouthpiece down to his waist, where it swelled into an ovoid.
“Reminds me of my bagpipe back aboard the Enterprise,” Scott murmured sadly.
“I’m glad our dops know how to play these crazy things,” McCoy said as his fingers ran a masterly arpeggio on the strings.
Ensign George came down the van steps to join them. Her face was adorned in the delicately styled golden mask. It disguised her completely, but was as deliciously female as the face it covered. Her body was wrapped in a long black cape.
Kirk called to the impatient Tram Bir, “We await the Messiah’s pleasure.”
Tram nodded and gestured for them to follow. They moved away from the Beshwa caravan under a cold glitter of stars, and marched toward the looming black of the Messiah’s tent.
Driving gusts of wind raced through the area whipping the Messiah’s banner and buffeting the sides of the huge, ebony pavilion. Tram Bir exchanged a few words with the soldiers who guarded the entrance. The flaps were flung back, and the party passed into a small antechamber.
Inside, guards gathered around them curiously.. Tram Bir said something that Kirk couldn’t quite catch to a soldier who seemed to be in charge. He glanced back at the group, then nodded; and Tram moved through a heavy curtain which separated the antechamber from the main body of the tent.
From beyond the curtain, Kirk heard the growl of a mass of voices, sporadic laughter and shouts. There was the clatter of crockery and an occasional crash as a drinking bowl was dropped. Kirk was given a brief glimpse of the interior as the curtain parted again. He got an impression of depth, darkness interspersed with the light of hot-burning torches, and many clan chieftains. Tram came back out.
“The Messiah awaits your performance,” he said. “But it is his order that you be searched carefully before entering.”
Kirk glanced at the others in his party, then made a sign of acquiescence. He took a step, brushing closer to Ensign George.
“Almost home, Ensign. Turn on the nullifier,” he whispered.
Without a sign that she had heard, Kirk saw her left hand move to cover a thick wristband, one of several on her right arm. She gripped it tightly, activating the mechanism.
Tram disappeared behind the curtain again and the guards moved toward them.
“Open your clothes,” one guard growled. “Messiah orders that you be searched—completely.” His smile displayed decaying, crooked teeth.
“For what?” Chekov began.
“Hikif! You know better than to question the Messiah’s command,” Kirk snapped. One of the guards moved to Chekov, while two more pinned his arms. The search was brief, painful, and thorough.
When several of the guards turned to Sara, she stepped back. Kirk opened his mouth to order her to cooperate, then closed it quickly.
She pirouetted away from the men and giggled. In a low voice, she purred to the guards. She turned her back to the Enterprise party and parted her cloak. The guards gasped.
One nudged another whose mouth was partway open. “She couldn’t hide much in that outfit,” he said and grinned appreciatively.
The others nodded in agreement. Sara giggled again and demurely closed her cloak. She rejoined her fellow officers.
“That was quite a performance,” Kirk whispered.
“Captain, I haven’t even begun to perform. Just wait!” she said.
The chief guard barked an order and his men snapped to attention and marched to the curtain and parted it.
Kirk caught Sara’s hand. “Do your best,” he whispered. “There’s a lot at stake.”
“Aye, Captain,” she whispered. “Trust my dop.” Her hips moved sensuously and she gave a provocative little bump before moving ahead of the four men.
Kirk nodded to his officers and led the party through the tent doorway.
Directly ahead was an oval of hard-packed earth. Ranged around it were intricately woven mats and husky chieftains lounging on throws of lush fur. Large trays loaded with wine jugs and exotically colored and strangely shaped fruits and nuts were at their elbows. Serving men scurried in and out of another entrance directly across from Captain Kirk and his fellow officers. The lift of a hand or a bellow from the first rows of men sent a servant scuttling to his side to replenish his wine jugs and fruit bowls. Further back, the men were less lavishly dressed. They sat on bare neelot hides, and their signals to the servants were not answered with such alacrity. Kirk suspected Tram Bir had been in their ranks, on the very perimeter of their ranks, before he had gotten the Messiah’s ear and told him of Sara’s charm. Now he sat importantly in the very first row.
The Messiah was at the head of the oblong tent. He lounged on a raised dais draped with a silken, vermilion fur, the exact shade of the slashes of color beneath the eye holes of his ink-black, hooded mask. Guards were ranked in a semicircle behind him. Oil lamps on long poles flickered and smoked and sent eerie, grotesque shadows up the sides of the tent.
Kirk gave a roll on his drum to announce their presence. When he dropped his arms, the guard led the Beshwa party forward to the edge of the circle of hard-packed earth.
The Messiah waved a long-fingered hand. “Welcome.”
The performers bowed and Kirk murmured, “Peace and long life, Messiah.”
“Live long and prosper—Hirga of the Beshwa,” the Messiah responded after a pause.
Tram Bir stood, swaying slightly, and raised a nearly empty wine bowl. “Bring more torches that we may have more light to see the performance!” he shouted.
Instantly, serving men scurried in bearing torches. They drove the sharpened pole ends into the ground around the edge of the tamped earth circle.
The Messiah moved his hand in an impatient gesture. “We’re waiting, Beshwa. Entertain us.”
Kirk bowed and moved his band to one side. Scott, Chekov, and McCoy squatted and began to tune their instruments. Kirk set his drum on the ground and went to Sara, who still stood at the edge of the circle with her golden-masked head lowered, her slender body completely hidden in the long cape. As she lifted her hands to the clasp at her throat, his eyes caught the thick band on her wrist and he breathed a silent prayer. Then he took hold of the cape and whirled it away. There was a momentary silence as the tent full of men leaned forward to ogle the shapely body of the young ensign.
Kirk took his place behind the drum, glanced at his friends, and relaxed his mind, allowing the talent of his Beshwa dop to flood through him. As his ringers lightly caressed the drum’s taut membrane, bringing a soft murmur from it, McCoy and Chekov drew bows across their instruments, evoking steadily rising, pulsing notes. Scotty joined in just as the sound seemed on the verge of passing from the audible range. Kirk’s palms came down on the drums, interweaving a beat into the cascading sounds.