Var the Stick (12 page)

    A show! To the distant spectators, it must appear that the two were in a terminal struggle, staggering about the mesa after an all night combat. This was the fight!

    "Wanna sleep," Soil mumbled. "Lie down. Sick. Keep the cold off me, Var, there's a good nomad...." Her knees folded.

    Var hooked his arms under her shoulders and held her up. "We can't sleep. Not while they're watching."

    "I don't care. Let me go." She lapsed into sobbing again.

    Var had to set her down.

    "It's that beer, isn't it?" she said, suddenly wide awake. "Im drunk. They never let me have any, Sol and Sosa. Awful stuff. Hold me, Var. I feel all weak. I'm frightened." Var decided that any further show of battle was hopeless. He lay down and put his arms about her, and she cried and cried.

    After a time she regained self-control. "What'll we do, Var?"

    He didn't know.

    "Could we both go home and say it didn't work?" she asked plaintively. Then, before he could answer, she did:

    "No. Bob would kill me as a traitor. And the war would go on."

    They sat side by side and looked out over the world.

    "Why don't we tell them somebody won?" she asked suddenly. "Then it'll be settled."

    Var was dubious, but as he considered it the proposal seemed sound. "Who wins?"

    "We'll have to choose. If I win, you nomads will go away. If you win, they'll take over the underworld. Which is better?"

    "There'll be a lot of killing if we go down there," he said. "Maybe your maybe Sol and Sosa."

    "No," she said. "Not if Helicon surrenders. And you said they were friends Sol and the Nameless One. They could be together again. And I could meet Sola, my true mother." Then, after a moment: "She couldn't be better than Sosa, though." He thought about that, and it seemed reasonable. "I win, then?" -

    "You win, Var." She gave him a wan smile and reached for the bread.

    "But what about you?"

    "I'll hide. You tell them Im dead."

    "But Soli!"

    "After it's over, I'll find Sol and tell him I'm not dead. By then it won't make any difference."

    Var still felt uneasy, but Soli seemed so certain that he couldn't protest. "Go now," she urged. "Tell him it was a hard battle, and you fell down too, but you finally won."

    "But I'm unmarked!"

    She giggled. "Look at your arm."

    He looked at both arms. His right was clean, but his left, the weaponless one, was laced with bruises. She had been scoring, that serious part of the fight. Soil herself was almost without blemish.

    "I could bash you in the face a couple of times," she said mischievously. "To make it look better." She tried to suppress a titter and failed. "I think I said that wrong. The fight, I mean. It isn't that ugly. Your face, I mean."

    Var left her there and began his descent. She would play dead until dusk, then make her way down the safest route as well as she cOuld. He worried, but she told him that she knew the way and anyhow would have plenty of time to be careful Certainly he couldn't wait for her. "I'll start down before it's all the way dark," she said. "So i'll be past the killer slope before I can't see any more."

    He halted a few feet down and called up to her: "If anything happens where can I find you?" He could not get rid of his morbid concern.

    "Near the hostel, dummy," she called back. "hurry up. I mean down.

    He obliged, not avoiding abrasions since they would make his supposed fight to the death seem more authentic. He would be telling a lie but at least he was doing the right thing, and he had also preserved his oath. He had learned the final lesson the Master had taught him.

    "Var! Va-a-ar!" Soil was calling him, her dark head poked over the edge.

    "What?"

    "Your clothing!"

    He had forgotten! He was wearing the stolen clothing. If he returned in that, everything would be exposed; ironically.

    Embarrassed, he returned to the mesa and stripped to the skin. The material would help keep her warm, anyway.

    There was jubilation that night at the Master's base camp, and Var was feted in a manner he was wholly unaccustomed to. He had to eat prodigiously, not daring to admit he was not hungry for the first time the women of the neighbouring camp, suspiciously quick to appear afterword of the victory had spread, found him attractive. But all he could think of was little Soil, struggling down the treacherous cliffs in the dark, carrying her bundle of food and clothing. If she fell, their ruse would become real. Pity....

    The warriors assumed that he had fought a male sticker, and Var chose to avoid clarification of the matter. "I killed," he said, and stopped there. And fended off male congratulations and female attentions until finally Tyl saw the way of it and found him a private tent for the night.

    In the morning the Master went to the hostel to talk to the television set, taking Var along. The Master had not questioned him, and seemed apprehensive. "If Bob pulls a doublecross, this is when it will happen," he muttered. "He is not the type to yield readily, ever."

    Soli's own assessment of the underworld master seemed to concur. That must be a devil of a man, Var thought.

    They entered the elegant cylindrical building, with its racks of clothing and sanitary facilities and its several machineries, and the Master turned on the set. As it warmed up, Var realized that once again they had blundered safely past disaster for if that set had been on when Soli came, the underworld would have known what was happening.

    The picture that came on was not the random, vapid collection of costumed posturings Var had observed from time to time before. Nor was it silent. It was a room not like the hostel room, but certainly the work of crazy machines. It was square, with diagrams on the opposite wall, and airvents, and a ponderous metal desk in the center.

    In fact, it was rather like a room in a building such as he had prowled through in the badlands. But clean and new, not filthy and ancient.

    A man sat in a padded, bendable chair behind the desk. He was old, older than the Master, at least thirty and possibly more. Var did not know how long a man could live if he suffered no mishap in the circle. Perhaps even as long as forty years. This one had sparse gray-brown hair (actually, the picture was colorless, but that was the way it looked) and stern lines in his face.

    "Hello, Bob," the Master said grimly.

    "Hello again, Sos. What's the word?" The man's tones were brisk, assured, and he moved his tong thin arm as though directing subordinates. A leader of men: yes. Var did not like him.

    "Your champion did not return?"

    The man merely stared coldly at him.

    "This is Var the Stick our champion," the Master said. "He informs me that he killed your champion on the mesa of Muse yesterday."

    "Impossible. Surely you realize no lesser man than yourself could have defeated Sol of All Weapons in honest combat."

    The Master seemed stricken. "Sol! You sent Sol?

    "Ask your supposed champion," Bob said.

    The Master turned slowly to Var. "Sol would not have gone. But if he had"

    "No," Var said. "It wasn't Sol." He didn't understand why the underworld leader should play such a game.

    "Perhaps, then, his mate, if the term is not unkindly euphemistic," Bob said, his glance possessing a peculiar Intensity. "She of the deadly hands and barren womb."

    "No!" Var cried, knowing now that he was being baited, but reacting to it, anyway. The Master, astonishingly, was sweating. It was as though the real battle was taking place here, rather than on the mesa. A strange contest of deadly words and savage implications. And Bob was winning it.

    Bob looked at his fingernails during the pause. "Who, then?"

    "His-daughter. Soil. She had sticks."

    The Master opened his mouth but did not speak. He stared at Var as though pierced by a bullet.

    "I apologize," Bob said smoothly. "Var was there, after all. He did kill our designated champion. Her parents were too wary to cooperate, so are in our bad graces; but she was, shall we say, cooperatively naive. Of course she was only eight years old-eight and a half or better, technically and I think we'll have to delay further action on this matter in favor of a rematch...."

    Var realized that the man's over elaborate words signified his intent to renign. But the Master was not protesting. The Master conthued to stare dumbly at Var. There was another wait. "You killed Soli?" the Master said at last, so hoarsely as to be hardly comprehensible.

    Var did not dare tell the full truth, here before the underworld leader. "Yes."

    The Master's whole body shook as though he were cold. Var could not understand what was the matter. Soil was no relation to him; the Master had not even known her when She begged food from him. True, it was unkind to kill a girl but he had had to meet the mountain's chaimpion, in whatever guise. Had it been a mutant lizard, he still would have fought. Why was the Master so upset now, and why was Bob looking so smug? They were acting as though he had lost the battle.

    "So I was correct about her," Bob said. "Sol never let on. But obviously"

    "Var the Stick," the Master said formally, his voice quivering with emotion. "The friendship between us is ended. Where we meet next, there is the circle. No terms but death. In deference to your ignorance and to what is past, I give you one day and one night to flee. Tomorrow I come for you."

    Then he whirled and smote the television set with his massive fist. The glass on the face of it shattered and the box toppled over. "And after that, you!" he shouted at the dead machine. "Not one chamber will escape the flamethrower, and you shall roast on the pyre, alive!"

    Var had never seen such fury in any man. He understood none of it, except that the Master intended to kill both him and the underworld leader. His friend had lost his sanity.

    Var fled from the hostel, and kept on running, confused and ashamed and afraid.

CHAPTER TWELVE

    He whirled, grabbing for his new set of sticks. Then he relaxed. "Soil!"

    "I saw you run from the hostel So I came, too. Var, what happened?"

    "The Master" Var was stopped by an misery.

    "He Wasn't he happy that you won?"

    "The Bob reniged."

    "Oh." She took his hand solicitously. "So it was for nothing. No wonder the Weaponless is mad. But that isn't your fault, is it?"

    "He says he'll kill me."

    "Kill you? The Nameless One? Why?'

    "I don't know." It was as though she were the inquiring adult, he the child.

    "But he's nice. Underneath. He wouldn't do that. Not just because it didn't work."

    Var shrugged. He had seen the Master run amuck. He believed.

    "What are you going to do, Var?"

    "Leave. He's giving me a day and a night."

    "But what will I do? I can't go back to the mountain now. Bob would kill me and he'd kill Sol and Sosa too. For losing. He told me he'd kill them both if I didn't fight, and if he finds out"

    Var stood there having no answer.

    "We weren't very smart, I guess," Soil said, beginning to cry.

    He put his arm around her, feeling the same.

    "I don't know enough about the nomads," she said. "I don't like being alone."

    "Neither do I," Var said, realizing that it was exile he faced. Once he had been a loner and satisfied, but he had changed.

    "Let's go together," Soli said.

    Var though about that, and it seemed good.

    "Come on!" she cried, suddenly jubilant. "We can raid some other hostel for traveling gear, and and run right out of the country! Just you and me! And we can fight in the circle!"

    "I don't want to fight you any more," he said. "Silly! Not each other! Other people! And we can make a big tribe with all the ones we capture, and then come back and"

    "No! I won't fight the Master!"

    "But if he's chasing you"

    "I'll keep running."

    "But, Var!"

    "No!" He shook her off.

    Soli began to cry, as she always did when thwarted, and he was immediately sorry. But as usual he didn't know what to say.

    "I guess it's like fighting your father," she said after a bit. That seemed to be the end of it.

    "But we can still do everything else?" she asked wistfully, after a bit more.

    He smiled. "Everything!"

    Reconciled, they began their flight.

    By dusk they were ensconced in an unoccupied hostel twenty miles distant. "This is almost like home," Soli said. "Except that it's round. And everything's here I guess the nomads haven't raided it this week."

    Var shrugged. He was not at home in a hostel, but this had seemed better than foraging outside for supper. Alone, he would have stayed in deep forest; but with Soli "I can fix us a real underworld meal," she said. "Uh, you do known how to use knives and forks? I saw how the cooks did it. Sosa says I should always be able to do for myself, 'cause sometime I might have to. Let's see, this is a 'lectric range, and this button makes it hot"

    One word stuck in his mind as he watched her busily hauling out utensils and supplies. Sosa. That was the name of her stepmother, he knew. The little woman he had encountered underground, who had thrown him down so easily. The Master had spoken the name too. But there was something elso Sos! Bob of the mountain had called the Master Sos! And so had Tyl, earlier, he-remembered that now. As though the Nameless One had a name! And Sos would be the original husband of Sosa!

    But Sol was married to Sosa, there in the mountain. And Sos was married to Sola. How had such a transposition come about?

    And if Soil were the child of Sol and Sola was there also a Sosi, born of Sos and Sosa? If so, where?

    Var's head whirled with the complexity of such thinking.

    Somewhere in this confusion was the answer to the Master's strange wrath, be was sure. But how was be to untangle it?