Into the thinking kingdoms - Alan Dean Foster [64]
“All right.” The swordsman sighed. “Tell us what we have to do to get out of here. If it’s a fine, we’ll try to come up with the money to pay it.”
“Oh no. Fining you would be a useless gesture characteristic of primitive extortionate regimes.” The woman was smiling at him once again. “We might as well put a knife to your ribs in the middle of the street. We’d never think of doing such a thing.”
“No indeed,” the middle monk added. “We are not an agency of punishment, fiduciary or physical.”
Simna relaxed a little. “Hoy, that’s good to hear.”
“Then what do you want of us?” Unlike his friend, Ehomba did not relax. “Why have we been brought here?”
“Why, so you can be helped, of course.” The smiles of the three were brighter than ever.
At this pronouncement the swordsman lost his composure. “What do you mean, ‘helped’?”
The monk on the end gazed across at him with infinite compassion. “To think appropriately, of course.”
Simna ibn Sind did not like the sound of that. He did not like the sound of it one bit. “Thanks, but I’ve been thinking for myself for nigh on thirty-one years now, and I’m comfortable with the process just as it is. Set in my ways, you might say.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” the monk assured him. “It’s a consideration common to many improper thinkers, and one easily corrected. Don’t worry—we’ll take care of it for you.”
“By Gambrala, do I have to spell it out for you? I don’t want ‘it’ taken care of!”
Ehomba put a calming hand on his companion’s shoulder. A by now highly agitated Simna shook it off, but out of consideration for his friend held back the stream of words his tongue was preparing to launch.
“Why do you care how we think?” The herdsman addressed the panel in a voice calm with respect and genuine interest. “We come from other lands and are just passing through your country. With luck we will be beyond the borders of Tethspraih and inside Phan in a few days. Then our way of thinking will no longer concern you.”
The woman was shaking her head slowly. “If we allowed that to happen we would be derelict in our duty to our fellow man. All of us would have to do penance.”
“If you treat every visitor this way I’d think you wouldn’t have much trade with your neighbors.” Simna had calmed down—a little.
“Some of our neighbors are amenable to persuasion,” the monk on the end informed them. “With others we have treaties that, regrettably, prohibit us from exposing them to the satisfactions that come with decreed thinking. But we have no such treaty with you.”
“And because of that,” the man in the center added, “we have a wonderful opportunity to spread right thinking to countries whose names we may not even know! Because when you return to your homelands it will be as disciples for the Tethspraih way of life.”
“I got news for you,” Simna retorted. “The only way of life I’m a disciple for is the Simna ibn Sind way of life. It’s pretty popular in its own right, and while I’m real fond of it myself, I’d no more run around trying to inflict it on someone else than I would try to make them eat my favorite pudding.”
“We can fix that.” The man on the end wore a big smile that thoroughly belied the implied threat behind his words.
“No one said anything to us about such things when we entered your country,” Ehomba told them. “If they had, we would have avoided Tethspraih, and gone around its borders.”
“The sheepherder should have told you.” The woman shook her head sadly. “What a waste of a fine mind. The majority of his thinking is improper.”
When he had first met Lamidy Coubert, Ehomba had