Homecoming

VIII

Orc officers were skilled in subterfuge and concealment of purpose. They practiced them unceasingly in the vicious politics of command. But in those politics, character concealment was neither troubled with nor possible; they were too much alike, and too many were telepaths.

Now, when it might have been possible to conceal their character from their visitors, they didn’t know how. Both assigned hosts wore togas instead of uniforms, but their arrogance, hardness, and utter lack of compassion were increasingly apparent with continued contact.

In contrast, Chandra and Anne Marie were conspicuously innocent, earnest, and benign.

The driver, standing against the dashboard of the polished and topless bronze chariot, was like none of his passengers. He was a non-personality whom his masters would notice only in failure or error, unless one of them was looking for someone to abuse. To Chandra and Anne Marie, he was silently informative, a source of inner discomfort.

Their first afternoon had been spent with their two hosts beneath an awning on one of the roof gardens of the varied-level palace. What had been anticipated as a session of questions and answers had proved to be a round of frustration. It became clear that their hosts would not be frank, and they in turn dared not be. But the orc telepaths had learned abundantly from their unspoken thoughts and reactions.

At Chandra’s request, much of the subsequent two days had been spent seeing the city, and their cameras had been busy. Yesterday they had visited the squat cylindrical granaries and seen how barges would be unloaded in harvest time. Blindfolded oxen trod in circles, turning a heavy capstan that powered a conveyor screw. The cats that policed the granaries seemed as arrogant and efficient as the orcs.

Today’s visit had been to a slaughterhouse where women cut up carcasses of beef, their strong bare arms smeared with blood. The floors were mortared stone, sloping to drains and scrubbed daily with lye. From the slaughterhouse the ambassadors had been taken upstream to the water intake plant, where the long vanes of windmills pumped canal water into tanks resembling the granaries. The stout bald man in charge had bowed and smiled and rubbed his hands. A man of responsibility, he nonetheless wore numerals tattooed on his forehead, like their driver and the women in the slaughterhouse and every other unarmed inhabitant they’d noticed.

Afterward Anne Marie had ridden in preoccupied silence. Now she looked around again. From the air I thought this place was handsome, she told herself, but it’s not. It’s ugly. Nothing green, nothing growing except on and around the palace. Just stone buildings and hectares on hectares of pavement. At least they’d had the foresight to install lots of storm drains. But why no soil, no grass, no trees? Two-storied row buildings of precisely fitted stone blocks crowded the wide streets. Their windows were small in the thick walls, giving built-in tunnel vision.

From the air they had seen substantial grounds separating the buildings from those behind them. She thought she knew now what they were: drill grounds. She couldn’t remember whether they had looked paved or not, and tried to glimpse them through the alleyways between buildings. But the alleyways were long and narrow; from the moving chariot her eyes were rewarded by nothing more than momentary slots of light.

The hard-faced officers sat facing them; she and Chandra thought of them as “the Centurions.” What were they thinking, sitting so expressionlessly?

Chandra broke the silence. “Why have most of the workers we’ve seen been women?”

“The men have been taken into the army,” one of the officers recited. “Barbarians threaten the country, and we must defend it.”

“From the sky we saw a fight between barbarians and some of your cavalry. Then we flew over their encampment. There aren’t enough of them to endanger the Empire of Kazi or this city.”

Neither “centurion” spoke for perhaps a minute. Finally the second one replied. “Many thousands more are scattered through the country northwest of the sea. They have laid waste the country there, butchering the inhabitants and burning the towns.”

“Where do you keep the children?” Anne Marie asked. “All I’ve seen are girls at least ten years old. I haven’t seen any boys at all. Where do you keep them?”

The two faces turned to her, and somehow made that simple act a communication of contempt. “Children are kept separate so that the women may work without hindrance. They live in separate quarters.”

“But who brings them up? Who takes care of them?”

“Those who are assigned.”

She persisted. “When can we visit them?”

“I do not know.”

They were grateful to reach the palace grounds, to be led by a steward to their luxurious quarters.

The upper levels of the palace consisted of numerous segments of terraces, some of them entirely gardens, others with one or more apartments opening onto gardens. Chandra and Anne Marie had a terrace, with its apartment, to themselves. After supper they found their reclining chairs had been moved into the shade of three neatly sheared cedars where they could sit out of the evening sun. A small olive-colored bird sang energetically in a low waxy-leaved tree.

Anne Marie gestured at the chairs. “Moved again. I’m afraid our privacy is fictitious.”

“The price of service, I suppose. At least they’re quiet and inconspicuous.”

“And efficient.”

“The whole outfit is efficient.” With a grunt Chandra lowered himself into one of the chairs. “I don’t know why I ate so much, unless it was to make up for a lousy day.”

“I suppose frustration is part of being an ambassador,” she replied. “And it hasn’t been a total loss. We’re getting a pretty good idea of their technology and the kind of people they are. And a lot of good video footage.”

She walked to the balustrade and looked northward across the city’s roofs. “What kind of games do you suppose they play in that big stadium?”

“The word is arena. A stadium implies athletic contests. I’d be surprised if they didn’t set tigers loose on the slaves over there. I’ve got the feeling they’d feed them babies without blinking.”

“Do you suppose they’re going to let us see the children?” she asked.

“I doubt it. The boy children are probably in barracks somewhere, getting military training. I think the women are slaves and most of the men are soldiers. Mike was right: This city has no walls because it has a big tough professional army. And who but slaves would wear numbers tattooed on their foreheads?”

They both remained silent for awhile.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be so critical of the orcs,” Anne Marie said thoughtfully. “They have to cope with a pretty hard and warlike world. Like those barbarians.”

“Don’t blame the barbarians for the orcs; not that pack of barbarians anyway. The orcs said they’re just arriving, but this city and its culture have been around for awhile.”

He got to his feet. “I think it’s time to call Matt again, and this time I won’t mince words.”

On the Phaeacia, Matthew looked unseeingly at the instrument panel for a long moment after Chandra broke transmission.

“Huh! Whatever those people are, they’ve made a rotten impression on Chan and Anne. What do you make of it?”

“Well,” Nikko answered, “when he said that about ‘feeding them babies,’ I remembered what orcs were. Orcs in ancient literature, that is.”

“Oh? What?”

“An army of subhuman monsters.”

Matthew looked at her, perplexed.

“It was in a fantasy I read when I was about fourteen or fifteen-a trilogy, The Lord Of The Rings. In the story there was an evil sorcerer, a super sorcerer, who’d lived for centuries. Millennia, in fact. And he’d bred an army of sadistic subhuman monsters called orcs, and tried to conquer the world with them. He even had a black tower, like the city down there.”

“Isn’t that a little-improbable? Ancient literature-fantasy literature, anyway-is unlikely to have survived down there. They must have gotten the word from something else. Don’t you think?”

Nikko shrugged. “All the computer had to say about ‘orc’ was, a fish-like marine mammal of Earth. And there are an awful lot of parallels between what’s down there and what’s in the book. What I’m concerned about is the kind of society it would be that tried to emulate the land of Mordor.”

Matthew leaned back and pulled briefly on his chin. “I think I’ll call a team meeting for oh-eight hundred tomorrow,” he said reflectively. “Maybe we need a different contact, for a little perspective.”

“A different contact? With whom?”

“How about some simple straightforward savages this time? The barbarians. It ought to be interesting and even informative. And there shouldn’t be any danger in it. We can just sit in the pinnace with the force shield on and talk to them from there.”