The Island Under the Earth by Avram Davidson Read Free Book Online Page B

his hand into his pocket and drew out a handful of talley-stones, but instead of putting them in the now once again empty grooves he began to drop them, one by one, from one hand into the other.
Click. Click … Click
… After a while he said, “Clarb was captain of a coaster twenty years ago. He’s master of a coaster today. Do you want to be coast-master” …
click … click … click
… “twenty-years from now? or do your ambitions go further?” …
click
…
    The young man may have gulped, but his answer came soon and sturdy enough. “They go further.” The merchant’s head went slowly up …
click
… and came slowly down …
click
… he said nothing.
    Young Captain Ramman had noticed the way Clarb had strutted off, trying to suck his stomach in. He regarded the still untold bundle of knotcords in his freckled fists. At this rate it would be dark before he got to the winehouse. Tabnath Lo was a crabfish with a hard shell, that was certain. He thought wistfully of the girls, familiar, and the girls, new, of good wine and good food and afterwards a good bath. What did the merchant mean? What did he want? … Old Clarb! … Twenty years! … Master of a seacrosser! Lo had seacrossers!
    “I can tell you this much, Merchant,” he said, to his own surprise: “the passenger was heard to say, the subject of
Dolphin
having come up somehow, that rather than ship on her he’d tie a stone around his neck and wade out and drown
himself
. He said it would come cheaper.” And heard in his ears, aghast, the echo of his voice.
    The merchant smiled, and it was a cheerful smile. “Oh,
Dolphin’
s not that bad,” he said. Then, “Let me keep your talley-cords, Captain Ramman. Post a guard aboard your vessel and we’ll account the cargo tomorrow. — Early, mind!”
    Ramman fairly danced away. He got to the winehouse while old Clarb was still dipping his snout into the first jug, and almost choked into it, seeing his junior there so soon. Ramman had one of the new girls on his lap inside of a minute, and then he showed her some ear-rings he’d brought with him from Silverstrand, and then he took out her old ones and they played a game about putting in the new ones, and then he ordered wine and they shared the mug and then they went upstairs and played another game, and when they sent for more wine, and afterwards she asked him what he was thinking about and he lied cheerfully and then they played another game.
    But he had been thinking about Tabnath Lo, and how interested he’d been in the ships’ passengers.

Chapter Twelve
    The farmwife dozed and nodded by the fire. Every now and then she by an obvious effort of will got up and put her ear to the chinks of one or another of the windows, and her lips moved; then she stumbled wearily back to the fire. Once and twice she had gone to Spahana and spoken softly, softly to her, gesturing to the piles of springy bed-branches; but the younger woman had merely stroked her hands, let her lips move into the brief-most of smiles. The bosun snored lightly, one hand on his knife, one on his ropes. And Stag sat at the augur’s feet.
    “There is no reason in logic to assume that either one was first,” the augur was saying. One side of his face was lit by the dim ruddy fire, the other by the unwinking phosphorlight of the log of gleamwood. He seemed two people. “We don’t ask if riverhorses were before seahorses, or the other way around. We all know the story of the monstrous infatuation with an onager and the monstrous birth it brought forth: perhaps a four-limbed woman
did
give birth to six-limbed twins, one male and one female; if so, it would have been as natural for her to conceal them as it had been unnatural for her to conceive them and as natural for the people to want to destroy them once their existence was discovered. If the story is true it would certainly account for many things, such as their extreme shyness in times past, their absolute refusal to allow