Glen Cook The Tower of Fear

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dislike them because they were locusts, stripping resources and wealth
wherever their armies were successful. He suspected greed moved them more than
did religious fervor.
He helped secure the harness, then stepped back. There would be nothing to do
till the laborers had the mast step ready to drop into the hull. Cullo was on
to someone else, so he went and found Billygoat where he was pounding and
tamping caulking rope into laps of clinker planks with a wooden mallet and
wedge. The old man was quick and deft. He was ten feet ahead of his assistant,
who was sealing the laps with hot pitch.
"That stuff stinks," Aaron told the old man.
"Pitch? You get used to it. Gets to smell damned good if you're out of work
for a while. You dogging it?"
"Hoisting the step."
"Uhm."
"They decided what to name her yet?" Billygoat knew everything before the
foremen did. There was a battle going on at the top over the name of the ship.
A struggle between zealots and practical merchants who knew she would be
entering ports where the Herodian god would not find a warm welcome.
"Nope. Something on your mind, Aaron?"
"Yeah." He did not know how to broach it without sounding like an old woman,
so he just had at it. "Remember when you told me about they found those lost
kids out by Goat Creek?"
"Uhm." The older man's hands never stopped moving.
"You ever heard about them finding any other ones?"
"Worried again?"
"Some. Not for me this time. Friend of my wife had her little boy taken
yesterday. An only child."
"Uhm." Billygoat paused to look at him directly. "You got one hell of a big
determination to let this business fuss you, don't you, Aaron?"
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What could he say? He couldn't mention the dreams and the nightmare certainty
that something would happen to Arif. After all your precautions? they would
ask. You have to be crazy.
Maybe he was.
"Now you bring it up, though, Aaron, yeah, it seems I do remember hearing
about two, three other kids that turned up the
same way. Good clothes, good health, short on memories of what happened to
them while they was missing." Billygoat's hands were busy again.
"They knew their families?"
"I never heard anything said otherwise."
Aaron sighed a sigh that started right down in the roots of his soul. There
was something to hang on to and nurture.
"Good, then," Billygoat said. "And what else do you have on your mind this
morning, young man?" Part of Billygoat's charm was his assumption of the old
man's role, though he was far from elderly.
Aaron was startled. Was he that obvious when he was troubled?
"Yep. The old man's a mind reader. What the hell did you expect, Aaron, moping
around here all morning? Nobody pays attention? Come on. Spit it out."
"It isn't that easy, Billygoat. It's one of those things where you've got to
make a choice, and even ignoring it is a choice, and no matter what you choose
somebody is going to get hurt. So what you have to do is pick who gets it."
"Yeah. Those kind are a blue-assed baboon bitch, ain't they? Homar, it's time
you broke. You're getting tired and sloppy trying to keep up. I see a couple
places you're going to have to do over."
Aaron couldn't see anything wrong with Homar's work. Neither could Homar, he
suspected, but Billygoat's assistant cleaned his tools, put more charcoal on,
broke up a couple of pitch billets and put them in to melt, then went away.
"So, Aaron. Let's talk about it."
"What do you know about the Living?"
Billygoat's eyes got wary. "As little as I can. Knowing too much could get you
a chance to swim across the bay with a hundred pounds of rocks tied to your
toes."
"Yeah." He hadn't thought of that angle. "What I meant was, are they something
worthwhile, or are they just a bunch of diehards making it rougher for the
rest of us?"
Billygoat smiled. "You don't get me that easy, Aaron. It's in the eye of the
beholder. Why don't you lay out the problem and if I see something I'll say so
and if I don't I'll forget you even asked."
Aaron thought about it a minute, but there was not much going on inside his
head. All he wanted to do was puke it up, get it out of his gut before it
poisoned him.
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"Say there was a guy who betrayed Qushmarrah in a way that was just as
important as what Fa'tad did, only hardly anybody noticed, and only one guy
knew, and the traitor didn't know he knew, and one day years later suddenly it
looked like the traitor was now somebody real important in the Living. If he
worked for the Herodians before ..."
"I see." Billygoat raised a hand for silence. He had stopped working. "Say no
more." He turned inward for several minutes. Then, "With the years intervening
there would have grown up knots of personal considerations and complications,
not so? The fight for Qushmarrah is over and lost. The traitor probably has a
family now, all completely innocent, who would suffer terribly from any
belated justice. Yet if he were indeed high in the councils of the Living, and
still a tool of Herod, and the Living are a worthy group of men with a real
chance of restoring Qushmarrah's independence and glory . . . Yes sir, Aaron,
truly a blue-assed bitch baboon of a problem."
Someone up top yelled at Aaron to come on. The men on the hoist were ready to
lower the mast step.
"I'll think about this, Aaron. For every no-win situation I've ever seen
there's always been an extra way out if you could just back off and look at
the whole map from a skewed angle. Talk to me later. Get up there before they
get pissed."
"Thanks, Billygoat." Aaron trotted to the nearest scaffolding, clambered up,
crossed the ship on a work deck of loose planks, checked that everything he
had brought up earlier was still handy. His helpers were ready. "Lower away!"
The step assembly came down slowly. The men helping turned it, aligned it,
guided it into place. Aaron beckoned the foreman. "It looks like a good fit.
But let's check the join points to make sure."
Ten minutes later he was puffed with pride. Only one place did he need to
plane a bit offa beam end. Cullo told him, "You have to stay in this business,
Aaron. We'd get the contracts filled in half the time."
Aaron shrugged, went to the side, had the men on the hoist lift the assembly a
foot and a half. His helpers started brushing all the join points with
adhesive. He let it set up a little, then had the assembly dropped into place [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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