Rastignac had contacted the harbor-master and made arrangements for workmen to unload his cargo of wine. His freehandedness with the gold eggs got him immediate service even on this general holiday. Once in the square, he and his men uncrated the wine but left the two heavy chests on the wagon which was. .h.i.tched to a powerful little six-legged Jeep.
They stacked the bottles of wine in a huge pile while the curious crowd in the square encircled them to watch. Rastignac then stood on a chest to survey the scene, so that he could best judge the time to start. There were perhaps seven or eight thousand of all three races there--the Ssa.s.sarors, the Amphibs, the Humans--with an unequal portioning of each.
Rastignac, looking for just such a thing, noticed that every non-human Amphib had at least two Humans tagging at his heels.
It would take two Humans to handle an Amphib or a Ssa.s.saror. The Amphibs stood upon their seal-like hind flippers at least six and a half feet tall and weighed about three hundred pounds. The Giant Ssa.s.sarors, being fisheaters, had reached the same enormous height as Mapfarity. The Giants were in the minority, as the Amphibs had always preferred stealing Human babies from the Terrans. These were marked for death as much as the Amphibs.
Rastignac watched for signs of uneasiness or hostility between the three groups. Soon he saw the signs. They were not plentiful, but they were enough to indicate an uneasy undercurrent. Three times the guards had to intervene to break up quarrels. The Humans eyed the non-human quarrelers, but made no move to help their Amphib fellows against the Giants. Not only that, they took them aside afterwards and seemed to be reprimanding them. Evidently the order was that everyone was to be on his behavior until the time to revolt. Rastignac glanced at the great tower-clock. "It"s an hour before the ceremonies begin," he said to his men. "Let"s go."
XI
Mapfarity, who had been loitering in the crowd some distance away, caught Archambaud"s signal and slowly, as befit a Giant whose feet hurt, limped towards them. He stopped, scrutinized the pile of bottles, then, in his lion"s-roar-at-the-bottom-of-a-well voice said, "Say, what"s in these bottles?"
Rastignac shouted back, "A drink which the new Kings will enjoy very much."
"What"s that?" replied Mapfarity. "Sea-water?"
The crowd laughed.
"No, it"s not water," Rastignac said, "as anybody but a lumbering Giant should know. It is a delicious drink that brings a rare ecstacy upon the drinker. I got the formula for it from an old witch who lives on the sh.o.r.es of far off Apfelabvidanahyew. He told me it had been in his family since the coming of Man to L"Bawpfey. He parted with the formula on condition I make it only for the Kings."
"Will only Their Majesties get to taste this exquisite drink?"
bellowed Mapfarity.
"That depends upon whether it pleases Their Majesties to give some to their subjects to celebrate the result of the elections."
Archambaud, also planted in the crowd, shrilled, "I suppose if they do, the big-paunched Amphibs and Giants will get twice as much as us Humans. They always do, it seems."
There was a mutter from the crowd; approbation from the Amphibs, protest from the others.
"That will make no difference," said Rastignac, smiling. "The fascinating thing about this is that an Amphib can drink no more than a Human. That may be why the old man who revealed his secret to me called the drink Old Equalizer."
"Ah, you"re skinless," scoffed Mapfarity, throwing the most deadly insult known. "I can out-drink, out-eat, and out-swim any Human here.
Here, Amphib, give me a bottle, and we"ll see if I"m bragging."
An Amphib captain pushed himself through the throng, waddling clumsily on his flippers like an upright seal.
"No, you don"t!" he barked. "Those bottles are intended for the Kings.
No commoner touches them, least of all a Human and a Giant."
Rastignac mentally hugged himself. He couldn"t have planned a better intervention himself! "Why can"t I?" he replied. "Until I make an official presentation, these bottles are mine, not the Kings". I"ll do what I want with them."
"Yeah," said the Amphibs. "That"s telling him!"
The Amphib"s big brown eyes narrowed and his animal-like face wrinkled, but he couldn"t think of a retort. Rastignac at once handed a bottle apiece to each of his comrades. They uncorked and drank and then a.s.sumed an ecstatic expression which was a tribute to their acting, for these three bottles held only fruit juice.
"Look here, captain," said Rastignac, "why don"t you try a swig yourself? Go ahead. There"s plenty. And I"m sure Their Majesties would be pleased to contribute some of it on this joyous occasion. Besides, I can always make more for the Kings.
"As a matter of fact," he added, winking, "I expect to get a pension from the courts as the Kings" Old Equalizer-maker."
The crowd laughed. The Amphib, afraid of losing face, took the bottle--which contained wine rather than fruit juice. After a few long swallows the Amphib"s eyes became red and a silly grin curved his thin, black-edged lips. Finally, in a thickening voice, he asked for another bottle.
Rastignac, in a sudden burst of generosity, not only gave him one, but began pa.s.sing out bottles to the many eager reaching hands. Mapfarity and the two egg-thieves helped him. In a short time, the pile of bottles had dwindled to a fourth of its former height. When a mixed group of guards strode up and demanded to know what the commotion was about, Rastignac gave them some of the bottles.
Meanwhile, Archambaud slipped off into the mob. He lurched into an Amphib, said something nasty about his ancestors, and pulled his knife. When the Amphib lunged for the little man, Archambaud jumped back and shoved a Human-Amphib into the giant flipper-like arms.
Within a minute the square had erupted into a fighting mob.
Staggering, red-eyed, slur-tongued, their long-repressed hostility against each other, released by the liquor which their bodies were unaccustomed to, Human, Ssa.s.saror and Amphib fell to with the utmost will, slashing, slugging, fighting with everything they had.
None of them noticed that every one who had drunk from the bottles had lost his Skin. The Skins had fallen off one by one and lay motionless on the pavement where they were kicked or stepped upon. Not one Skin tried to crawl back to its owner because they were all nerve-numbed by the wine.
Rastignac, seated behind the wheel of the Jeep, began driving as best he could through the battling mob. After frequent stops he halted before the broad marble steps that ran like a stairway to heaven, up and up before it ended on the Porpoise Porch of the Palace. He and his gang were about to take the two heavy chests off the wagon when they were transfixed by a scene before them.
A score of dead Humans and Amphibs lay on the steps, evidence of the fierce struggle that had taken place between the guards of the two monarchs. Evidently the King had heard of the riot and hastened outside. There the Amphib-changeling King had apparently realized that the rebellion was way ahead of schedule, but he had attacked the Amphib King anyway.
And he had won, for his guardsmen held the struggling flipper-footed Amphib ruler down while two others bent his head back over a step. The Changeling-King himself, still clad in the coronation robes, was about to draw his long ceremonial knife across the exposed and palpitating throat of the Amphib King.
This in itself was enough to freeze the onlookers. But the sight of Lusine running up the stairway towards the rulers added to their paralysis. She had a knife in her hand and was holding it high as she ran toward her foster-father, the Amphib King.
Mapfarity groaned, but Rastignac said, "It doesn"t matter that she has escaped. We"ll go ahead with our original plan."
They began unloading the chests while Rastignac kept an eye on Lusine. He saw her run up, stop, say a few words to the Amphib King, then kneel and stab him, burying the knife in his jugular vein. Then, before anybody could stop her she had applied her mouth to the cut in his neck.
The Human-King kicked her in the ribs and sent her rolling down the steps. Rastignac saw correctly that it was not her murderous deed that caused his reaction. It was because she had dared to commit it without his permission and had also drunk the royal blood first.
He further noted with grim satisfaction that when Lusine recovered from the blow and ran back up to talk to the King, he ignored her. She pointed at the group around the wagon but he dismissed her with a wave of his hand. He was too busy gloating over his vanquished rival lying at his feet.
The plotters hoisted the two chests and staggered up the steps. The King pa.s.sed them as he went down with no more than a curious glance.
Gifts had been coming up those steps all day for the King, so he undoubtedly thought of them only as more gifts. So Rastignac and his men walked past the knives of the guards as if they had nothing to fear.
Lusine stood alone at the top of the steps. She was in a half-crouch, knife ready. "I"ll kill the King and I"ll drink from his throat!" she cried hoa.r.s.ely. "No man kicks me except for love. Has he forgotten that I am the foster-daughter of the Amphib King?"
Rastignac felt revulsion but he had learned by now that those who deal in violence and rebellion must march with strange steppers.
"Bear a hand here," he said, ignoring her threat.
Meekly she grabbed hold of a chest"s corner. To his further questioning, she replied that the Earthman who had landed in the ship was held in a suite of rooms in the west wing. Their trip thereafter was fast and direct. Unopposed, they carted the chests to the huge room where the Master Skin was kept.
There they found ten frantic bio-technicians excitedly trying to determine why the great extraderm--the Master Skin through which all individual Skins were controlled--was not broadcasting properly. They had no way as yet of knowing that it was operating perfectly but that the little Skins upon the Amphibs and their hostage Humans were not shocking them into submission because they were lying in a wine-stupor on the ground. No one had told them that the Skins, which fed off the bloodstream of their hosts, had become anesthetized from the alcohol and failed any longer to react to their Master Skin.
That, of course, applied only to those Skins in the square that were drunk from the wine. Elsewhere all over the kingdom, Amphibs writhed in agony and Ssa.s.sarors and Terrans were taking advantage of their helplessness to cut their throats. But not here, where the crux of the matter was.
XII
The Landsmen rushed the techs and pushed them into the great chemical vat in which the twenty-five hundred foot square Master Skin floated.
Then they uncrated the lead-leaf-lined bags filled with stolen geese and emptied them into the nutrient fluid. According to Mapfarity"s calculations, the radio-activity from the silicon-carbon geese should kill the big Skin within a few days. When a new one was grown, that, too, would die. Unless the Amphib guessed what was wrong and located the geese on the bottom of the ten-foot deep tank, they would not be able to stop the process. That did not seem likely.