The Witches of Karres (5 page)

"Wouldn't try that!" she murmured. Mad again, the captain reached out quickly and got a handful of leathery c
l
oth. There was a blur of motion, and what felt like a small explosion against his left
kneecap.
He
grunted
with anguished surprise and fell back on a bale of Councilor Rapport's
all-weather
cloaks. But he had retained his grip—Goth fell half on top of him, and that was still a favorable position.

Then her head snaked around, her neck seemed to extend itself, and her teeth snapped his wrist. Weasels don't let go—

"Didn't think he'd have the nerve
!
” Goth's voice came over the intercom. There was a note of grudging admiration in it. It seemed she was inspecting her bruises. All tangled up in the job of
bandaging
his freely bleeding wrist, the captain hoped she'd find a good plenty to count. His knee felt the si
z
e of a sofa pillow and throbbed like a piston engine.

"
The captain is a brave man,"
Maleen
was saying reproachfully.
"
You should have known better."

"
He's not very smart, though!" the
Leewit
remarked suggestively. There was a short silence. "Is he? Goth? Eh?" the Leewit urged.

"You two lay off him!" Maleen ordered. "Unless," she added meaningfully, "you
want to swim
back to
Karres
—on the
Egger
Route!"

"Not me," the Leewit said briefly.

"You could do it, I guess," said Goth. She seemed to be reflecting. "All right—we'll lay off him. It was a fair fight, anyway."

They raised
Karres
the sixteenth day after leaving
Porlumma.
There had been no more incidents; but then, neither had there been any more stops or other contacts with the defenceless Empire. Maleen had cooked up a poultice which did wonders for his knee. With the end of the trip in sight, all tensions relaxed; and Maleen, at least, seemed to grow hourly more regretful at the prospect of parting. After a brief study
Karres
could be distinguished easily enough by the fact that it moved counterclockwise to all the other planets of the
Iverdahl
System.

Well, it would, the captain thought. They came soaring into its atmosphere on the dayside without arousing any detectable interest. No communicator signals reached them, and no other ships showed up to look them over.
Karres,
in fact, had the appearance of a completely uninhabited world. There were a large number of seas, too big to be called lakes and too small to be oceans, scattered over its surface. There was one enormously towering ridge of mountains, which ran from pole to pole, and any number of lesser chains. There were two good-sized ice caps; and the southern section of the planet was speckled with intermittent stretches of snow. Almost al
l
of it seemed to be dense forest. It was a handsome place, in a wild, somber way. They went gliding over it, from noon through morning and into the dawn fringe—the captain at the controls, Goth and the Leewit flanking him at the screens and Maleen behind him to do the directing. After a few initial squeals the Leewit became oddly silent. Suddenly the captain realized she was
blubbering.

Somehow it
startled
him to discover that her
homecoming
had affected the Leewit to that extent. He felt Goth reach out behind him and put her hand on the
Leewit's
shoulder. The smallest witch
sniffled
happily.

"
'S
beautiful!" she growled. He felt a resurgence of the wondering, protective friendliness they had aroused in him at first. They must have been having a rough time of it, at that. He sighed; it seemed a pity they hadn't gotten a
l
ong a little better.

"
Where's everyone hiding?" he inquired, to break up the mood. So far there hadn't been a sign of human habitation.

"There aren't many people on
Karres,"
Maleen
said from behind him. "But we're going to the town—you'll meet about half of them there."

"What's that place down there?" the captain asked with sudden interest. Something like an enormous lime-white bowl seemed to have been set flush into the floor of the wide valley up which they were moving.

"That's the Theatre where... ouch!" the
Leewit
said. She fell silent then but turned to give Maleen a resentful look.

"Something strangers shouldn't be told about, eh?" the captain said tolerantly. Both glanced at him from the side.

"We've got
rules,"
she said. He let the ship down a bit as they passed over
“the
Theatre where—
"
It was a sort of large, circular arena with numerous steep tiers of seats running up around it. But all was bare and deserted now.

On
Maleen's
direction, they took the next valley fork to the right and dropped lower still. He had his first look at
Karres
animal life then. A flock of large creamy-white birds, remarkably terrestrial in appearance, flapped by just below them, apparently unconcerned about the ship. The forest underneath had opened out into a long stretch of lush meadowland, with small creeks winding down into its center. Here a herd of several hundred head of beasts was grazing—beasts of
mastodonic
size and build, with hairless, shiny black hides. The mouths of their long, heavy heads were twisted into sardonic crocodilian grins as they blinked up at the passing Venture.

"Black
Bollems,"
said Goth, apparently enjoying the captain's expression. "Lots of them around; they're tame. But the grey mountain ones are good hunting."

"Good eating too!" the Leewit said. She licked her lips daintily. "Breakfast—
!"
she sighed, her thoughts diverted to a familiar track. "And we ought to be just in time!"

"There's the field!" Maleen cried, pointing. "Set her down there, captain!"

The "field" was simply a flat meadow of
c
lose-trimmed grass running smack against the mountainside to their left. One small vehicle, bright blue in colour, was parked on it; and it was
bordered
on two sides by very tall blue-black trees. That was all. The captain shook his head. Then he set her down.

The town of
Karres
was a surprise to him in a good many ways. For one thing there was much more of it than one would have thought possible after flying over the area. It stretched for miles through the forest, up the flanks of the mountain and across the valley—little clusters of houses or individual ones, each group screened from all the others and from the sky overhead by the trees.

They liked colour on
Karres;
but then they hid it away! The houses were bright as
flowers,
red and white, apple green, golden brown—all
spick
and span, scrubbed and polished and aired with that brisk green forest-smell. At various times of the day there was also the smell of remarkably good things to eat. There were brooks and pools and a great number of shaded vegetable gardens in the town. There were risky-looking
treetop
playgrounds, and
treetop
platforms and galleries which seemed to have no particular purpose. On the ground was mainly an enormously confusing maze of paths—narrow trails of sandy soil snaking about among great brown tree roots and chunks of grey mountain rock, and half covered with fallen needle leaves. The first few times the captain set out unaccompanied, he lost his way hopelessly within minutes and had to be guided back out of the forest.

But the most hidden of all were the people. About four thousand of them were supposed to live currently in the town, with as many more scattered about the planet. But you never saw more than three or four at any one time—except when now and then a pack of children, who seemed to the captain to be uniformly of the
Leewit's
size, burst suddenly out of the undergrowth across a path before you and vanished again.

As for the others, you did hear someone singing occasionally, or there might be a whole muted concert going on all about, on a large variety of wooden musical instruments which they seemed to enjoy
tootling
with, gently.

But it wasn't a real town at all, the captain thought. They didn't live like people, these witches of
Karres
—it was more like a flock of strange forest birds that happened to be nesting in the same general area. Another thing: they appeared to be busy enough—but what was their business? He discovered he was reluctant to ask Toll too many questions about it. Toll was the mother of his three witches, but only Goth really resembled her. It was difficult to picture Goth becoming smoothly matured and pleasantly rounded, but that was Toll. She had the same murmuring voice, the same air of sideways observation and secret reflection. She answered all the captain's questions with apparent frankness, but he never seemed to get much real information out of what she said.

It was odd, too! Because he was spending several hours a day in her company, or in one of the next rooms at any rate, while she went about her housework. Toll's daughters had taken him home when they landed; and he was installed in the room that belonged to their father—busy just now, the captain gathered, with some sort of geological research elsewhere on
Karres.
The arrangement worried him a little at first, particularly since Toll and he were mostly alone in the house.
Maleen
was going to some kind of school; she left early in the morning and came back late in the afternoon. And Goth and the
Leewit
were plain running wild! They usually got in long after the captain had gone to bed and were off again before he turned out for breakfast.

It hardly seemed like the right way to raise them. One afternoon, he found the Leewit curled up and asleep in the chair he usually occupied on the porch before the house. She slept there for four solid hours, while the captain sat nearby and leafed gradually through a thick book with illuminated pictures called "Histories of Ancient
Yarthe."
Now and then he sipped at a cool green, faintly intoxicating drink Toll had placed quietly beside him some while before, or sucked an aromatic smoke from the enormous pipe with a floor rest, which he understood was a favorite of Toll's husband.

Then the
Leewit
woke up suddenly, uncoiled, gave him a look between a scowl and a friendly grin, slipped off the porch and vanished among the trees. He couldn't quite figure that look! It might have meant nothing at all in particular, but—

The captain laid down his book then and worried a little more. It was true, of course, that nobody seemed in the least concerned about his presence. All
of Karres
appeared to know about him, and he'd met quite a number of people by now in a casual way. But nobody came around to interview him or so much as dropped in for a visit. However, Toll's husband presumably would be returning presently and— How long had he been here, anyway? Great
Patham,
he thought, shocked. He'd lost count of the days! Or was it weeks? He went in to find Toll.

"
It's been a wonderful visit," he said, "but I'll have to be leaving, I guess. Tomorrow morning, early..."

Toll put some fancy sewing she was working on back in a glass basket, laid her strong, slim witch's hands in her lap, and smiled up at him. "We thought you'd be thinking that," she said, "and so we... you know
.
Captain, it was quite difficult to decide on the best way to reward you for bringing back the children."

"It was?" said the captain, suddenly realizing he'd also clean forgotten he was broke! And now the wrath of
Onswud
lay close ahead.

"However," Toll went on, "we've all been talking about it in the town, and so we've loaded a lot of things aboard your ship that we think you can sell at a fine profit!"

"Well, now," the captain said gratefully, "that's fine of
—"

"There are furs," said Toll, "the very best furs we could fix up—two thousand of them!"

"Oh!" said the captain,
bravely
keeping his smile. "Well, that's wonderful!"

"And the
Kell
Peak essences of perfume," said Toll. "Everyone brought one bottle, so that's eight thousand three hundred and twenty-three bottles of perfume essences!"

"Perfume!" exclaimed the captain. "Fine, fine— but you really shouldn't—
"

"And the rest of it," Toll concluded happily, "is the green
Lepti
liquor you like so much and the
Wintenberry
jellies. I forget just how many jugs and jars, but there were a lot. It's all loaded now." She smiled. "Do you think you'll be able to sell all that?"

"I certainly can!" the captain said stoutly. "It's wonderful stuff, and I've never come across anything like it before."

The last was very true. They wouldn't have considered
miffel
fur for lining on
Karres.
But if he'd been alone he would have felt like bursting into tears. The witches couldn't have picked more completely unsalable items if they'd tried! Furs, cosmetics, food, and liquor—he'd be shot on sight if he got caught trying to run that kind of merchandise into the Empire. For the same reason it was
barred
on
Nikkeldepain
—they were that afraid of contamination by goods that came from uncleared worlds!

He
breakfasted
alone next morning. Toll had left a note beside his plate which explained in a large rambling script that she had to run off and catch the
Leewit,
and that if he was gone before she got back she was wishing him goodbye and good luck.