Free The Island Under the Earth by Avram Davidson Page B

first framed.
Pity rather than hate the Sixlimbed Folk, for they have men minds and brute bodies, and just as much as their men minds strive to direct their brute bodies so do their brute bodies strive to direct their men minds
.
    Something seemed odd, down there in the grassy bowl below. Something seemed to have changed. Were there fewer sixies than before? They swayed to and fro, heads down and lolling about, their arms sometimes on each others’ necks and sometimes hanging loosely; and in that confused mass of them it was hard for him to count them either by heads or hands or legs. He did not know. He did not know. And, along with the confused conviction that
something
was wrong, there began to grow from deep within him a sick fear that that either the day or the way had been “gathered up” again … and this time perhaps in another, and, if possible, worse form. He clutched the grass with his hands, and lay his face upon the cool earth. And then he felt a tug upon the back of his tunic.
    Once again it was Bosun, and once again he had his fingers to his lips. Stag’s sick fears suddenly were overwhelmed by a feeling of intense irritation. By Rahab and Leviathan! Were they to spend all this day and perhaps other days slithering behind bushes and hushing each other like schoolgirls playing pranks behind the back of a nodding nurse? He squirmed quite around and sat bolt upright, angrily brushing an ant from his nostril. The bosun, having fully gained his master’s attention and knowing well how to read his moods, now thought it prudent to depart a ways — making, as he did so, an apologetic gesture to his left. There at the foot of the hillock which formed on this side the outer part of that great natural bowl, under the dogwood trees, stood the element missing from inside and among the sixies — the line of onagers, still laden, still (or once again) cropping the grateful grass, and now linked together by that same rope which the old sixy had summarily taken from around the Bosun’s waist.
    He and the bosun stared at each other and then, wordlessly, they took the foremost beast by the bridle and led the entire caffle off into the forest.
    Behind them the noise of drunkenness and strife did diminish with distance but did not change in tenor. And, gradually, the dimlight deepened.

Chapter Seventeen
    After a while, when they judged it safe to speak, but still not safe to speak in other low voices, Stag said, “It was well-done, Bosun. But how did you do it?”
    “Do what?”
    “‘Do
what?’
Damn it, don’t bandy words with me! Haven’t I overheard your bragging often enough to know that you have no more modesty than a fish has navel?”
    The bosun said, in a faintly injured tone of voice, “If you mean roping and recovering the asses, I had nothing more to do with it than that I took the old bits of rope and new-fashioned them into one line. Who did do it? Who else could it have been, but the old sixy?
I
don’t know how.
I
didn’t see him — ” “No more did I.” “
I
was looking at the other ones, there in the pit, or whatever it is.” “So was I.” “And then he flung a turf at me, as he did at you … well, it had to be him, but I never saw him … and I turned me around, and, dragons take me, but there they were! And, you know, Captain, it’s an odd thing — ” “What’s that?” “Why, in the whole line running from bridle to bridle, it’s all just loops, you know. Just loops. I mean, it
was
. I mean, until I put a few in, there wasn’t one single knot in the entire line!”

Chapter Eighteen
    Captain Clarb had a deeply uneasy feeling that he ought not to be in the House of Dellatindílla the comprador, but, damn it, there he was! He searched his mind to think of a legitimate (that is, a commercial) reason why he should be there. At the moment he couldn’t think of one, but no doubt it would occur to him by and by. Meanwhile he watched with no small interest as his host’s hand,