"Ay--happen!" he mimicked, teasing her and spreading out a row of foreign coins, one under each finger, for her to take whatever was due in payment. "Help yourself. Why don't you take me now, instead of the money?"
"I'm not that hard up yet," retorted the girl, taking three of the coins and coming across to the settle. Her eyelids were stained with indigo and she had pinned a bunch of red-flowering tectron in her bodice. She smiled at Mollo and Elleroth, a little unsure how to address them, since on the one hand they were strangers and clearly gentlemen, while on the other they had been an audience for her little flirtation with the caravaneer.
"Good morning, my dear lass," said Elleroth, speaking as though he were her grandfather and at the same time looking her up and down with an air of open admiration which left her more confused than ever. "I wonder whether you have any real wine, from the south--Yeldashay, perhaps, or even just Lapan? What we need to drink on a morning like this is sunshine."
"There's none come in a long while, sir, more's t' pity," answered the girl "'Tis the war, y'see. We can't get it."
"Now I'm sure you're underrating the resources of this splendid establishment," replied Elleroth, putting two twenty-meld pieces quietly into her hand. "And you can always pour it into a jug, so that no one else knows what it is. Ask your father. Just bring the best you've got, as long as it's--er--well, pre-bear, you know, pre-bear. We shall recognize it all right, if it's from the south."
Two men came through the chain-curtained entrance and called to the girl in Chistol, smiling across at her.
"I suppose you have to learn a lot of languages, with so many admirers?" asked Mollo.
"Nay, they've to learn mine or I'm doon with them," she smiled, nodding, as she left, to Elleroth, to show that she would do as he had asked.
"Ah, well, I suppose the world still takes a lot of stopping," said Elleroth, leaning back on the settle, snapping a pickled aubergine and throwing half into his mouth. "What a pity so many furious boys persist in trying! Will it suit you if we go on talking Yeldashay, by the way? I'm tired of speaking Beklan, and Deelguy is beyond me, I fear. One advantage of this place is that no one would think it unduly odd, I believe, if we were to converse by coughing down each other's necks or tapping the table with very large toothpicks. A little Yeldashay will be all in the day's work to them."
"That boy," said Mollo, "you gave him money, after he'd stolen my knife. And what was that hole in his ear? You seemed to know what you were looking for, all right."
"You have no inkling, provincial governor?"
"None."
"Long may you continue to have none. You met this man Lalloc, you told me, in Deelguy. I wonder, did you ever hear tell of one Genshed?"
"No."
"Well, curse the war, then!" shouted a man who had just come in, evidently in reply to some remark of the landlord standing before him with compressed lips, shrugged shoulders and hands held out on either side. "Bring us any damn' thing, only be quick. I'm off south again in half an hour."
"What's the news of the war?" called Elleroth across the room.
"Ah, it's going to get rough again now the spring's here, sir," answered the man. "There'll be nothing coming up from the south now--no, not for some months, I dare say. General Erketlis is on the move--likely to drive up east of Lapan, so I've heard."
Elleroth nodded. The girl returned with a plain earthenware jug, leather beakers and a plate of fresh radishes and watercress. Elleroth filled both cans, drank deeply and then looked up at her openmouthed, with an exaggerated expression of astonishment and delight. The girl giggled and went away.
"Better than we might have expected," said Elleroth. "Well, never mind about the poor boy, Mollo. Put it down to eccentricity on my part. I'll tell you one day. Anyway, it's got nothing to do with what we were talking about on the lake."
"How did they get their bear back?" asked Mollo, crunching a radish and spreading out his legs toward the brazier. "What I heard--if it's true it frightens me, and no one's ever told me it's not--was that the bear smashed through the Beklan line and killed Gel-Ethlin as if it knew who he was. That's one thing they can all tell you in Deelguy, because there was a Deelguy contingent in the Beklan army and the bear killed their commander at the same time--tore his throat out. You must admit it's all very strange."
"Well?"
"Well, then the bear disappeared as night was falling. But you know where it is now--there, up the hill." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
"This man Crendrik--the king--he spent the whole of the following summer tracking it down," replied Elleroth. "As soon as the rains ended he went out with his priestesses or whatever they call them and worked over the whole country from Kabin to Terekenalt and from Gelt to the Telthearna. He used to be a hunter, I believe. Well, whether he was or not, he found the bear at last in some very inaccessible part of the hills and he fired the whole hillside, including two wretched villages, to force it down to the plain. Then he made it insensible with some kind of drug, hobbled it with chains--"
"Hobbled it?" interrupted Mollo. "How on earth do you hobble a bear?"
"They'd learned that no cage could hold it, so I was told, so while it was drugged they fastened its legs to a choke-chain around its neck, so that the more it kicked the more it throttled itself. Then it was dragged to Bekla on an open wheeled platform in less than two days--something like sixty miles. They had relays of men to take over from one another and never stopped at all. Even so it nearly died--didn't terribly care for the chains, you see. But it only goes to show, my dear Mollo, how much importance the Ortelgans attach to the bear and to what lengths they're prepared to go in anything that concerns it. Telthearna diving boys they may be, but they're evidently inspired to great heights by that animal."
"They call it the Power of God," said Mollo. "Are you sure it isn't?"
"My dear Mollo, what can you mean? (Let me fill up that leather thing you have there. I wonder whether they have any more of this?)"
"Well, I can't account for all that's happened in any other way. Old S'marr feels the same--he said they were meant to win. First the Beklans fail to get any sort of news of what's happened, then they go and split their army in two, then the rains break, then the bear kills Gel-Ethlin just when
he's got them beaten and no one in Bekla has the least warning until the Ortelgans are down on them--are you really saying that all that's mere coincidence?"
"Yes, I am," replied Elleroth, dropping his whimsical manner and leaning over to look straight into Mollo's face. "An over-civilized people grow complacent and careless and leave the door open for a tribe of fanatical savages, through a mixture of luck, treachery and the foulest inhumanity, to usurp their place for a few years."
"A few years? It's five years already."
"Five years are a few years. Are they secure? You know they're not. They're opposed by a brilliant general, with a base as near as Ikat. The Beklan empire is reduced to half of what it was. The southern provinces have seceded--Yelda, Belishba, arguably Lapan. Paltesh would like to secede and daren't. Deelguy and Terekenalt are both enemies, so far as they can spare time from their own troubles. The Ortelgans could be overthrown this summer. That Crendrik--he'll end in Zeray, you mark my words."
"They're reasonably prosperous--there's plenty of trade still in Bekla."
"Trade? Yes, what sort of trade, I wonder? And you've only to look around you to see how badly even a place like this is affected. What used to bring more prosperity to Bekla than anything else? Building, masonry, carving--all that sort of craftsmanship. That trade is ruined. There's no labor, the big craftsmen have quietly gone elsewhere and these barbarians know nothing of such work. As for the outer provinces and the neighboring kingdoms, it's only a very occasional patron who sends to Bekla now. Plenty of trade? What sort of trade, Mollo?"
"Well, the iron comes in from Gelt, and the cattle--"
"What sort of trade, Mollo?"
"The slave trade, is that what you're getting at? Well, but there's slave trading everywhere. People who lose wars get taken prisoner--"
"You and I fought together once to keep it at that. These men are desperate for trade to pay for their war and feed the subject peoples they're holding down--desperate for any sort of trade. So it's no longer kept at that. What sort of trade, Mollo?"
"The children, is that what you're getting at? Well, if you want my opinion--"