Clash of Star-Kings by Avram Davidson

Author:Avram Davidson [Davidson, Avram]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781440545924
Publisher: F+W Media, Inc.
Published: 2012-08-05T06:00:00+00:00

VII

He smelled the sour, stale stink of them … old sweat, old clothes, old pulque, and something else … worse than any of the others … his mind tried to identify this. Why, he could not say, particularly since part of his mind was aware that with some effort he could identify at least which puzzled him — and then recognition came: it was the evil, fishy reek of old blood, like a butcher who hasn’t changed his apron for days. So.

That done, now to the voices. He did not know them well at all, but he did know them … that is, he knew that he had heard them. The memory was neither clear nor pleasant. He kept his eyes closed.

“A nice piece of venison,” said one, poking a thick finger into Luis’s ribs. An ordinary voice, this one.

“Not dead, I hope?” This one was hoarse and phlegmy, one of the familiar ones — and, whereas the first comment had been made in Spanish, this second was in Nahua. And now the first one spoke again, and in Nahua, too.

“I don’t think so….” A hand was laid roughly on Luis’s heart. “No … this is still good….” The all but imperceptible pause was succeeded by a sigh of genuine longing, such as one might hear from a mother awaiting her long-delayed child or a woman yearning for the arms of a distant lover. It was not at all the sort of sound which one might expect to hear from the man, whoever he was or whatever he was, with the ordinary voice.

And now a third voice spoke, a thin and whining sort, this. “What is one? One is nothing, nothing at all. There must be hundreds, thousands!”

The hoarse one said, “Everything starts with one thing — Vamanos!” he concluded, abruptly. They tied Luis hand and foot and one of them tossed him over a shoulder as though he were a sack of cobs, and jogged off, the others (as Luis could hear) trotting alongside. It was almost insufferably uncomfortable, but he would hardly expect that anyone would shoot at him with the intention of subsequently buying him a ride on a primera clase bus. Furthermore, he had something else to occupy his mind besides his discomfort.

It was the last word that had done it, supplied the key. What the man’s name was, he didn’t remember, perhaps had never known. But he knew now who he was — the barrel-shaped, frog-faced fellow who presided every Saturday and Sunday in the marketplace over a caldron of hog-tripas frying in dirty, viscid oil … and spent the rest of the week holding up the wall in one of the filthy pulquerias of the Barrio Occidental. Hardly anyone except his fellow slummy neighbors bought the evil-smelling chitterlings, and it was his habit, as he slapped each leathery-looking portion, oozing oil, into a piece of paper, to shout, as though encouraging the next customer, “¡Vamanos!” — “Let’s go!” Ruiz. His name was Ruiz.

His going

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