?_"

The guard leaned over the grille. His large hat with its tall wings
sticking from the peak was green in the daytime. But now, illuminated
only by a far off torchlight and by a glowworm coiled around the band,
it was black.

"_Ah, shoo Zhaw-Zhawk W'stenyek_," he said, loudly. "What time is it?
What do you care what time it is?" And he concluded with the stock
phrase of the jailer, unchanged through millenia and over light-years.
"You're not going any place, are you?"

Rastignac threw his head back to howl at the guard but stopped to
wince at the sudden pain in his neck. After uttering, "_Sek Ploo!_"
and "_S'pweestee!_" both of which were close enough to the old Terran
French so that a language specialist might have recognized them, he
said, more calmly, "If you would let me out on the ground, _monsieur
le foutriquet_, and give me a good epee, I would show you where I am
going. Or, at least, where my sword is going. I am thinking of a nice
sheath for it."

Tonight he had a special reason for keeping the attention of the
King's mucketeer directed towards himself. So, when the guard grew
tired of returning insults--mainly because his limited imagination
could invent no new ones--Rastignac began telling jokes. They were
broad and aimed at the mucketeer's narrow intellect.

"Then," said Rastignac, "there was the itinerant salesman whose
_s'fel_ threw a shoe. He knocked on the door of the hut of the nearest
peasant and said...." What was said by the salesman was never known.

A strangled gasp had come from above.

IV

Rastignac saw something enormous blot out the smaller shadow of the
guard. Then both figures disappeared. A moment later a silhouette cut
across the lines of the grille. Unoiled hinges screeched; the bars
lifted. A rope uncoiled from above to fall at Rastignac's feet. He
seized it and felt himself being drawn powerfully upwards.

When he came over the edge of the well, he saw that his rescuer was a
giant Ssassaror. The light from the glowworm on the guard's hat lit up
feebly his face, which was orthagnathous and had quite humanoid eyes
and lips. Large canine teeth stuck out from the mouth, and its huge
ears were tipped with feathery tufts. The forehead down to the
eyebrows looked as if it needed a shave, but Rastignac knew that more
light would show the blue-black shade came from many small feathers,
not stubbled hair.

"Mapfarity!" Rastignac said. "It's good to see you after all these
years!