When the trading convoy filed into the tangle of flat-roofed houses which surrounded a hard-packed central square, women, children, and dogs came out, each in full voice. The procession kept straight on toward the entrance of a two-storeyed building. Half the ground-level was a stable; the rest, a courtyard where Ardelan and a handful of armed companions lolled under an awning of black goat-hair.
Terrestrian faces were no novelty to Verrill; but this time, being a stranger among them—instead of merely a spectator seeing a handful of them, half defiant and half uneasy in the strangeness of a trading-post—he saw what he had never before noticed. They tended toward height and ranginess, prominence of nose, angularity of face; yet behind this likeness was a shadow-pattern of racial differentiation. There were differences of flavor, rather than of outright form. The flare of a nostril, the shape of an eye, the fullness or thinness of lip—a thick necked one, here and there, suggested that, generations back, there had been among his ancestors a blocky Mongol from Central Asia.
The guards, instead of presenting Verrill, explained him as though he had been some trade article. Ardelan, listening, studied his visitor with entire impersonality, as he might have scrutinized a basket of fresh ripe apricots to see how they had endured being hauled so far.
"What's in the bag?" he demanded, abruptly.
"Medicine. I am a doctor."
"What for? People die anyway."
"A doctor," Verrill explained, concealing his dismay, "is not to keep people from dying. He is to make it more agreeable for them until they finally have to die."
Ardelan addressed his henchmen. The answers summed up to this: that if nothing much ailed a man, he'd get well by himself, and if something really incapacitated him, it would of course be something so serious that he could not last long at the best.
Ardelan digested this wisdom, then asked, "Verrill, can you make knives like these you gave that man?"
"I am a doctor, not a blacksmith."