"Foot pass! Parley!" Valentine called, in the lingua franca of St. Louis.
The females issued chirping noises, seeing what he had to offer. The male scratched an itch under his loincloth in thought, but his eyes didn't leave the oranges.
"I think we're good," Valentine said.
The nimble female plucked at his ears, urging.
The Grog planted his gunstock, hooted, and gave an unmistakable "get over here!" sweep of his arm. He licked his lips as he did so.
"Shit. I'd almost rather be shot at," Callaslough said.
* * * *
They arrived about an hour before sunset.
The humans walked the bike in with the help of one of the females. They wore soup cans around their necks, indicating that they'd come in peace and offered up tokens and gifts to be allowed on White-fang lands-the "foot pass" of Grog commerce and diplomacy.
The Whitefang encampment stood in an old field with an irrigation trench on three sides and thick woods on the fourth. Water flowed in the trench. Clay pots stood upstream for drinking water, and laundry lines hung downstream. Old books hung on the bushes shielding the toilet area where the ditch drained off.
The Whitefang villagers lived in tents made of pulled-up carpeting and quilts of plastics, weatherproofed with beeswax or musky smelling oil.
Human captives hewed wood, made charcoal, and carried water. They looked at the newcomers with pleading eyes.
Valentine avoided their gaze. Nothing you can do about it at the moment.
At first the tribe wanted nothing to do with Valentine and Callaslough. They young males, unblooded and untattooed, their long hair a testament to lack of wives, glared or hopped up and down in excitement, letting out little war cries. The younger females taunted by slapping their own backsides or spitting in the embassy's direction.
"Lots of unmated Groggies," Callaslough said as they walked the bike into the village.
Pizzaro had sent along a man who knew something of the Grogs, but Valentine would have preferred a little less experience. Callaslough was just finding things to be nervous about, and the Grogs read body language better than words.
The chief lived in an old farmhouse, apparently. On the lower level, the walls had been mostly pulled away to admit air, but the upper rooms remained intact. Valentine wondered how many wives were crammed into the aluminum-siding seraglio.
Stripped old farm equipment stood in the center of the village, a playland-junkyard for the little Grogs. They swung and climbed and chased each other and an assorment of village dogs in and out of old harvesting tubing, control cabs, and engine housings. At the edge of the playland, a scrubbed and polished claw-foot bathtub served as a central drinking trough.
Their escort Grog pointed to a place for them to sit and went up the stone stairs to the skeleton of the house's first floor.
The chief remained huddled with his subchiefs and elders. Valentine extracted a two-pound bag from his trade goods, went to the big drinking cistern, and ripped open the packet.
An elderly female tried to stop him, hooting and slapping at his hands. Valentine ignored her and emptied the packet, full of granules that looked like sand, into the trough.
That got the attention of the elders and the chief.
Valentine mixed the water with a clay carrying pot, upending and dumping the water as it began to froth.
"What the hell's that?" Callaslough asked.
"Root beer mix."
Valentine took his canteen cup and drank. Then he refilled it and offered it to the grandmother. She sniffed suspiciously and turned her head away.
"Damn," Valentine said. He filled another cup and drank again. It wasn't very good-the mixture really needed to sit and chill to be truly tasty-but it was sweet.
The younger Grogs weren't so shy. They slurped and squealed, and their elders ran forward to pull them away. A squirmy youngster managed to break away from his mother and go back to the tub, drinking with both hands.
The chief came out on his steps to watch, eyes shaded under a heavy brow. He had huge, woolly thighs that looked like a pair of sheep standing close together in a field. One of the youngsters brought him a cup of the mixture, babbling.
The chief, sniffed. He laughed and upended the mixture down his throat. He wiped his lips and laughed again.