The Enemy of My Enemy (5 page)

He had not gone very far across the lawn when the young man spoke, clearly, the single word,
“Quasi.”
And the departing visitor’s back started, arched, sagged, as though the young man had pierced it with one of his spears. A servant picked up cup and dish. The hostess made her first remark since the scene began.

“Destroy them,” she said.

The old scholar rose, sighing deeply. “Allow me. Allow me. You will allow me to show the august visitors the nearer view of the river, I must hope.” But host and hostess, rousing themselves, deplored the necessity of declining his offer. They must insist upon reserving that joy selfishly, they would escort the august visitors themselves … . In a moment only the old man, the brother-in-law, and Krakar remained by the refreshment tables.

“Is it to be believed?” the young man asked. “Is it to be endured? Is it not past time that something was done? They stone my brother’s boat. They invade my sister’s house. Oh — !” His face an almost tragic mask, his teeth chattered in an instant’s uncontrolled rage.

“I do not under — ”

“Volanth.
Volanth
!”

“But he was not — ? He did not look — ”

It was the Sapient Laforosan who undertook an explanation. “Ah, young foreign friend, it was in earlier days that our people cleansed their houses — it was cruel, true — by driving out the insane, the hopelessly diseased and immoral. They went into the wilderness and, shamelessly, they bred with the Volanth. The purge was hard, but it was necessary. We now have no more such amongst us. But you saw one of the results just now. A quasi-Volanth, carrying so many of the tainted Tarnisi genes that he thought himself able to pass as one of us. It was his tongue which quite betrayed him … though I suspected … as did this young man. Of course he did not wish his skin exposed to show him hairy as the other Volanth. A shameful incident. Too bad.”

Krakar nodded. In this, as in all other things, the Tarnisi exceeded his understanding. Volanth … Quasi … . That look of shame and that look of hate. Those howling, naked figures in the river.

Those long and hairy arms, as strong as spear-throwers, which could hold no weapons other than a stone — and which, with stone alone, could be so vengeful. And so accurate.

Much of Lady Mani Itér oTor’s past, as Jerred Northi had said, was either obscure or discreditable. Or both. But it was not doubted that she had validly married the sir Itér oTor, moribund scion of Pemath’s moribund titled gentry, and this marriage had done wonders for her social status. The sir himself had since peacefully died and been buried with pomp and circumstance in his crumbling family mausoleum back among the Hills of Tor. Doubtless, the few remaining gentry, squatting and starving in their mouldering palaces, did not open their doors to the sir’s widow. If this vexed her, which was unlikely, she did not show it. Her concern was not with any more of the past than could be of use to her in the present, and her present was in Pemath New Port. And there, amid the brash new villas and the ugly new blocks of flats, among the get-rich foreigners and the gotten-rich parvenus, Lady Mani, with her wealth and her title and her own innate cunning, made a mighty fine figure and did very well indeed.

So well, in fact, that she never appeared personally in either the front or even the rear offices of the “travel agency” at which Jerred Northi (hair dyed red, and almost buried in a back-country-cult burnoose) turned up two mornings later. The foreign clerk looked at him with controlled uncertainty. One never knew with these types — they might haggle forever over the cheapest passage to the nearest out-port … or they might bespeak the best accommodations available to the farthest Pemathi colony.

“What god-chop man go-want?” the clerk asked, civilly enough.

Northi showed him a card, took a number, sat down, fingered his hundred-bead rosary, from time to time glanced up and around from under his drooping hood. There were a number of well-nourished Pemathi, doubtless returning to jobs overseas from visits home, and now too high to resort to the native mass-passage companies. A polished-looking Lermencasi couple keyed their voices even lower than before as if to accentuate the difference between them and a Bahon engineer who was making a fuss about having to wait. An over-dressed tout, pretending to examine the posters, waiting to follow whoever left first. A few student tourers. The usual mixed lot. And then the clerk gestured to him.

One would not have thought that the agency would have had so many rooms in back of the front office. And certainly not that the “room” he was directed to was actually an elevator … not until the door closed behind him and the faintest of tremors advised him. It was, like the building itself (part of the complex Lady Mani holdings, no doubt), bran-new and up to date beyond comparison with Old Port counterparts. He did not know if he had gone up or down or how many floors. Then the door opened, revealing another room where a large, pale woman with close-cropped hair sat at one of those convenient desks which fold into the floor.

Walking in, he felt certain that this room too was an elevator. Convenient notion.

“There are lots of possibilities,” the woman said, ignoring preliminaries, and allowing him to sit or stand as he might prefer. “Where do you want to go?”

“Tarnis.”

“So would everyone else. Can’t be done. Sojourners permits, we don’t handle. Even if you could really pass for Pemathi. You really can’t … ” Something seemed to strike her mind. She nodded. “Of course … that could be arranged … No. Makes no sense. What it would cost you couldn’t be recouped if you served as a butler for a hundred years. If you could afford that … arrangement … why, fellow, the sensible thing is to go elsewhere with the money. Lermencas. Baho. Just about any of the islands. Besides … I said it could be arranged. I mean, it’s theoretically possible. I’m sure it’s not practicable, not actually possible. So.

“Now. Where do you want to go?”

“Tarnis.”

She looked up now from contemplating her large, pale, clean hands, and seemed for the first time to consider him as a person. Not, of course, as a man. But as a person. “Fellow,” she said, “you must be deep in bad trouble, or you wouldn’t be here, trying to get out of Pemath. Pemath is where people come from everywhere else when they get deep in bad trouble
there
. And you must have a good portion of money, or you wouldn’t have been sent to us,
here
. It goes without saying that you didn’t inherit or earn it by dull, honest toil. So we may presuppose a certain amount of realism as part of your make-up.” She sat back. He could hear the slight sound of cloth rubbing against cloth. It was a sensible gray cloth. She might have been a wardress in a very modern place of confinement in some well-run country.

“You know that Tarnis has the strictest immigration controls of any place on Orinel. Going there is, for you, out of the question. Except for Pemathi sojourners, who are allowed in as servants and skilled labor for a period of years, there
is
, in fact,
no
immigration to Tarnis. You know that, too.

“So. Now. For the last time. Where do you want to go?”

“Tarnis.”

She nodded, unsurprised. “Let me see your hands and feet,” she said. “All right,” she said, after a moment. “It’s not part of the regular service, you know. More’s involved than forged papers and clandestine entrance, you know. A good much more … I hope you had something to eat before you came here because you won’t get anything until they come to get you, and that won’t be soon. I also hope you were careful not to be followed here, because if anyone comes looking for you: too bad. All right — you can go back in the other room and wait. If you know the words that go with those god-chop beads, you may not be bored.”

He got up but didn’t leave. Instead, he drew back the burnoose so that his face was exposed, but not his dyed hair. “Tell me if you remember my face,” he asked.

She studied it a moment. “You were with a girl named Ko one night at that place I used to have down near Dock Ten.”

“That’s the only time?”

“Yes.”

“Think hard. Try to visualize me as a child.”

She stared at him with her blank eyes. “No … You’re wrong. I’ve never seen you before. And whatever happens, I’ll never see you again.”

He turned and went out. The doors closed, the rooms moved.

It was quite a while that he was alone. Again and again he let the dull black beads slip through his fingers, but he didn’t bother thinking about the words. He visualized her in her role as hostess to the flash, mixed world of Pemath New Port’s gay society — painted hair and face, jewels and robes, music, crowds, noise, perfume, elaborate lunches and intricate dinners, games and races and all of that … . And then he pictured her, when the doors were closed at last, stripping off wig and gown and gems and washing away the false faces and looking down at the immaculate, plain, strong hands with which she did her filthy work: the sample which he had seen just now being by very far the cleanest.

She said she remembered him only as a man, and her memory was famous. She was not always, though she probably was now, the only child-hunt purveyor in Old Port. How old was she? He had no idea, but she had been around, though not as
Lady
Mani, as far back as he could remember. And how far was that? Twenty years ago, when the coffin-craft
Italon
crashed in take-off — a convenient date — he had been fingering marks for old Adán One-Eye, the pursepicker. Maybe he’d been a bit under ten at the time. No dates came to his mind before then, but there had been, there
must
have been a few years at least in Pemath before then. The trouble was, they were all jumbled together and he could never get them to come apart. There was an old woman who hit him often and then fed him well and another old woman who was often as hungry as he was but who was sweet and loving and wept much. The time the pot of boiling oil overturned and scarred his hip. A long procession through the narrow streets, lots of bright colors, sweets skewered on a stick, he and other dirty snottled brats dancing happily about. A boy with a harelip who shared a mouth piece of bread with him and died in his arms in a wind-scoured alley. Woods and trees, the green of them standing out in his mind as bright as scarlet for being the only ones he could remember until his teens, and could of course have been nowhere in Old Port. Probably the Parks of Don, the nearest ones, a half-day’s excursion away, although the Parks never struck any chords of memory when he was there at later times; nor did he ever smell anything like the hot, herby scent always rising again whenever he thought of it … .

And as always, at last, the memory which lay underneath all other memories, the one he fought against, waking as well as sleeping — and fought against even now.

But even if Mani hadn’t then gained control of all the kiddy fairs that early, if she’d been in that game at all she would certainly have attended the monthly auctions and must have seen him there.
If he’d been there
. It could be that she simply could not identify Jerred Northi, man, with the nameless and of course terrified child. It could be — could it be? — that she was lying. Why should she not?

Brooding on the bootless question of that, his defenses down, he was swept away once again, as always, by the hot, still air, and the hideously frightening and unfamiliar noises; he was running, running, running, they were behind him and beside him and then they were ahead of him and his head hurt his legs hurt his feet hurt, he dared not stumble, he turned aside, there was no background and no scenery, and he ran and he ran and he
ran …
.

“Steady on!” said the man who entered from the other “room,” his arms full of packages. “I’m quite harmless.”

Jerred stared at him. Of course he was quite harmless. It wasn’t this monkey-faced fellow that made him jump to his feet with a cry of terror when the door opened. Or, not directly, it wasn’t.

“ — anybody who’d do that to a child,” he said, thickly.

“I don’t go for any of these mind-expanders,” Monkey Face said, shaking his head, opening things; “they can expand you right out of your own, true skull. Shuck those ecclesiastical fantods, your reverence, if you please.” He grinned.

Jerred wasn’t convinced that the man was convinced it was a drug. It didn’t matter, though. He disrobed, dressed in the clothes out of the boxes, after having submitted to a new complexion and a new face, new hair, and — once the tracheant was fitted in place where it wouldn’t show — a new voice. It was all very effective, but —

“But will it get you where you intend to be going?” asked Monkey Face, reading his mind. Grinned again. Did it again. “No, I can’t read your mind. But all the nods I take care of like this, they’ve all got the same own, true question. Answer is: No. It won’t. Not intended to. But will get you to where you’re going to do what
will
get you where you intend to be going … . Looks good on you. The perfect island-owner, up to spend the new crop money on a mad, flash whirl of the races, the river, the casinos, the hotels, and the flash, flash whorehouses — that’s what you look like.”

And may yet be
, Jerred thought to himself. He took a last look at himself — sun-reddened skin, tan turban, tan tunic and shorts — and said, in his new hoarse voice. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

• • •

“Yes, but why Tamis?”
asked the gentle voice beyond the very pleasant globe of kaleidoscopic lights. It was infinitely pleasant to lie at rest and watch the warmly-colored patterns change and change and change, slowly, slowly.

“Because it would be a waste just to run. Run I must, but if I must run, then let me run so as to get something besides just safety. Although it must stand to reason that Tarnis is safer than any other place worth being in. If it’s hard for me to run there, it’s hard for someone else to run after me there.”

“And what’s there that you want, besides safety?”

“Besides safety? Safety is there. I’ve been thieving and conniving all my life and all my ideas of success have been based on being a more successful thief. In Tarnis I wouldn’t have to.”