by Andre Norton
Organization, Hosteen granted them that, very efficient organization. Did they have Widders stowed away somewhere here, too? And what was the purpose of their mountain firetrap? Just to capture anyone trying to get up in the heights?
“One thing.” Logan broke through the other’s mental speculation. “Just before that brush fire walled me off, I saw it.”
“It?”
“The LB—it must have been the LB. And from the look I had, it didn’t crash when it landed—at least it wasn’t smashed up any to show.”
“You didn’t get a chance to examine it closely though?”
“No,” Logan admitted. “Something else queer—”
“That being?”
“There was stuff piled all around it—spears, bowls, hides. And somebody had killed a horse, left it lying with its throat cut and its skull bashed in, right up against the boat—Not too long ago, either.”
“Sacrifices.”
“Could be. Because the LB came out of the sky, d’you suppose? They can’t have seen space ships back here.”
“Maybe—but then why attack the ’copter when it came in for a landing,” countered the Terran. “If they had no experience with sky craft, one kind could be classed with the other. Unless—”
Unless, his mind raced, they did know the difference between an object from space and one merely traversing Arzoran skies.
“They could have contact with the plains, know the difference between flyers and space ships.” Logan was thinking in the same direction.
Or, Hosteen’s suspicions suggested, they could have contact with spacers. The fire weapon still posed a puzzle past his present ability to solve.
“This is a Thunder House.” Logan had been surveying his surroundings.
“I noticed some similarities with Nitra customs,” Hosteen returned. “See anything you know?”
Logan was the expert on native Arzor. Perhaps he could pick up some clue to their future or their captors’ intentions. Norbie clans were fond of ritual and tied by custom. There could be a pattern here that would fit with what Logan knew.
“They keep some Nitra ways,” his half-brother agreed. “The two stools, north and south, the east and west doors. And—watch that hunter coming in. See how he walks in and out among the pillars and not in a straight line? To do that would mean he was boasting before the powers. Their Drummer, he’s going into action now—watch!”
In the eerie light of the blue fire, the Drummer was still pounding his knee drum with two fingers, keeping up a barely audible tap of sound. With the other hand, he had tossed into the air above the fire pit two small white things that floated and soared upward on a puff of the warmer air until they were lost in the gloom of the roof.
“Prayer feathers—or rather fluff,” Logan explained. “Those warrior trophies are the same as Nitra, too.” He regarded with wry distaste the display of dried hands and skulls. “That’s the same way the blue horns hang them—”
“But does the Nitra Drummer do that?” demanded Hosteen sharply.
The medicine man had risen from his stool and put down his drum. Now he stood by the fire, the gaze of all the seated natives centered upon him. From the neck folds of his tunic he pulled a cord from which hung a tube some twelve inches long. It glistened not only with the reflection of the fire but also seemingly with a radiance of its own.
With ceremony the Drummer pointed this to the four points of the compass beginning at the north. And then he aimed one end directly at the air over the fire pit.
A fine spray spread from the end of the tube, carrying glittering, jeweled motes into the air. The motes gathered and formed an outline composed of tiny, spinning gems.
“A five point-star!” Logan cried out.
But already the design was changing, the motes spinning, reforming, this time into a triangle, and then a circle, and finally a shaft that plunged straight down into the fire pit and was gone.
“No Nitra does that!” Logan breathed.
“Nor a Norbie either,” Hosteen replied grimly. “That’s an off-world thing, of a kind I have never seen before. But I’ll take blood oath it isn’t native to Arzor!”
“Xik?” Logan demanded.
“I don’t know. But I have a suspicion it won’t be long before we find out.”
CHAPTER NINE
H
osteen tried to flex cramped muscles within the cocoon of net that held him. The night was gone, and none of their captors had so much as come into the quarter of the Thunder House where he and Logan were tethered. Yes—the night was gone.
Daylight struck in places through the thatch and walls of the upper part of the medicine house, but the heat was no greater than it would have been in grazing season on the plains. Within the valley, the Big Dry did not exist at all!
“Sun—but no heat—” he heard Logan mumble. “That lake—”
“Couldn’t control the weather,” Hosteen countered. They had rivers on the plains, sources of water that did not fail, yet there living things still must take cover during the day.
“Something does,” Logan returned obstinately.
Something did. What could control weather? There was one place on—or rather in—Arzor where there was controlled weather and controlled vegetation—the garden mountain into which Logan and Hosteen had blundered on their flight from the Xik—where the Sealed Cave people had set out growing things from a hundred different planets and left them to flourish for centuries. Controlled weather—that was not Xik, that was Sealed Cave knowledge!
“The Sealed Caves—” Hosteen repeated aloud.
“But this is in the open, not in a cave!” Logan’s thoughts matched with his. “How could they control the open?”
“How did they fashion that cavern?” Hosteen asked. “But if there are more remains of that civilization here, it could explain a lot.”
“The ‘medicine,’ you mean?”
“Yes, and maybe those tricky air currents that have defeated Survey exploration in here.”
“But the Norbies have always avoided the Sealed Caves.”
“In the outer Peaks they have, but here we can’t be sure the same taboo holds. We can’t even be sure that somewhere on Arzor, it might be right here, the Old Ones themselves don’t exist still. Don’t the legends say that they retired to some of the caves and sealed the openings behind them—eventually to issue forth again in the future?”
Hosteen did not quite believe that, though. That some wild Norbies were exploiting Sealed Cave knowledge—that was possible. That the mysterious and long-gone forerace among the stars could linger on here directing the activities of a primitive tribe or tribes—no, somehow that did not fit. The men, or creatures, who had designed and created the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens could have nothing in common with warriors who kept skulls and right hands of their defeated enemies to adorn their temples. There was a contradiction in mental processes there.
Again Logan’s thoughts followed the same path. “I’d rather believe the Norbies were heirs,” he said slowly.
“Unworthy ones, I think. Maybe the answer lies on that mountain.”
“We’ll probably never get a chance to learn it,” Logan’s reply was bleak. “I think we were cut out of the herd to supply some spectacular touches to a big Drum Feast.”
Hosteen had long ago reached the same conclusion. And his struggles against his bonds had proved to him the folly of trying to beat the Norbie system of confining prisoners. One could only fall back on the rather grim thought that as long as one was still alive, there was a small measure of hope.
“Listen!” Logan’s head bobbed up as he tried vainly to raise himself a few inches from the floor.
Drums were sounding, more than one now, with a pause between each roll. Hosteen, listening intently, thought he could distinguish a slightly different note in each one of those short bursts.
Norbies had been in and out of the Thunder House all morning, but now a large party entered from the south. Then came a
thin, wiry native, his black horns tipped with red, a shoulder plate necklace, not of yoris teeth but of small and well polished bones, covering most of his chest. He took the Chief’s stool.
Hosteen’s view of the scene was from floor level, but he sighted the second party entering from the west, a peace pole held up ostentatiously. Drummer and Chief walked behind that. When a second and then a third such delegation arrived through the western door, Hosteen realized this was not a gathering of a clan but a meeting of tribal representatives, and from tribes once enemies.
Five, six such delegations now, a handful of warriors ranked behind each chief and medicine man. The seventh—Hosteen started—Krotag and Ukurti led that.
The Drummer of the village was at the north stool. Now he beat a thunderous roll on his knee drum, and two youths broke from the villagers’ group, brought out between them a block of wood, square, polished with the sheen of years’, perhaps of centuries, handling. Planting this before the fire pit to the north, they laid upon it a leafy branch of the sacred fal tree, then scuttled back to the anonymity of the shadows behind their Drummer.
“Speeches now,” Logan half whispered in a lull of drumming.
Speeches there were, and Hosteen longed for the power to translate that whistling-twittering. In turn, the village Drummer and the Chief arose, walked to the block, struck it across the top with the fal branch, and launched into a burst of oratory, from time to time striking the block again with the fal wand to emphasize some point. Then each of the visiting chiefs and drummers followed their example.
Hosteen’s head ached, his mouth was parched and dry, and he lay gasping, hardly conscious of the continuing drone at the center of the Thunder House. He wanted water and food—but more than anything, water. Twice he tried to reach Baku, Surra—to no avail. The cat and the eagle might have escaped out of the valley, and he began to hope that they had.
Any chance he and Logan might have had now diminished to the vanishing point. He had thought of Krotag and the Shosonna as possible allies. But Krotag had been the second one to make a speech. Whatever tied the Norbies together in this peace pact was strong enough to withstand any leanings toward friendship with settlers that the plains natives might have once had.
How long that conference lasted neither Hosteen nor Logan could have told. The former was afterwards sure he had lapsed into semiconsciousness from fatigue, lack of water, and the smoky fumes of the fal twigs the Norbies kept feeding into the fire. When a sharp prod in the ribs roused him into full wakefulness, all traces of sunlight were gone and the gloom of night was cut again by blue torches.
One of the same youths who had dragged out the speech block leaned over him and thrust a tube through the mesh of the net and between the Terran’s lips. He sucked avidly, and liquid filled his mouth. If it was water, some other substance had been added, for it tasted sweet and yet sharp, like an off-world relish, and Hosteen sucked and swallowed greedily, his thirst vanishing, his mental torpor fading as he did so. Then the tube was jerked roughly from his lips, and he licked them for the last lingering drop, feeling energy creep back into his body. Logan was similarly fed and watered. Beyond the captives stood both the village Chief and the Drummer, watching the process with an air of impatience, as if eager to push on to some more important task.
A ripple of fingers on drum head brought in a guard of warriors, tough, seasoned fighting men, Hosteen judged from their attitude and the bone necklets they wore. Once more the ropes holding the nets were loosed, and the prisoners, still helpless in their lashings, were rolled like bales into the full torchlight.
Another warrior came out of the shadows, bearing across his shoulder the loops of their arms belts, their canteens. It would seem that where they were going their equipment was to accompany them. And for the first time, Hosteen remembered Logan’s grisly description of what he had seen about the grounded LB—sacrifices. Were they about to join the horse, to do honor to whatever power these Norbies imagined the star ship escape craft represented or held?
They had been carried into the village, but they were to walk out. Nets were whirled off their stiff bodies, a loop rope dragged tight about their chests and upper arms. Hosteen stumbled along for a step or two, trying to make his cramped limbs obey. Then two of his captors caught him by the shoulder on either side as supports and herders.
For the first time he saw the females of the village well behind the lines of warriors. Yes, some ceremony was in prospect, one intended for all the tribesmen and their visitors—for under each peace pole, which they had seen in the Thunder House earlier and which now were planted here in the open, was a grouping of strangers.
The two men were half led, half dragged along a well-worn trail leading from the village toward the dark bulk of the mountainside down which the fire had hunted them into their captors’ nets. Behind, as Hosteen saw when he glanced back once, trying to pick out Krotag’s group, the villagers and their guests fell in to form a straggling procession, carrying torches.
As they advanced, the smell of burned vegetation battled with that of fal wood. And they crossed those curiously straight furrows where the flails of flame must have beaten, either during their own chase or earlier.
Now the drums were beating. Not only that of the village medicine man but also those of all the visiting Drummers—with a heavy rhythm into which their marching steps fitted. And the beat of the drums became one with Hosteen’s pumping blood, a heaviness in his head—
Hypnotic! Hosteen recognized the danger. His own people could produce—or had produced ages ago—spells as a part of their war chants and dances, spells to send men out to kill with a firm belief in the invincibility of their “medicine.” This was not a pattern unique to Arzor.
He tried a misstep to break the pattern of the march. And perhaps because he had been indoctrinated during his Service training against just such traps, the Terran succeeded in part—or was succeeding—until the mountain came alive in answer to those with whom he marched.
That was what appeared to happen. Was it sound—vibration pitched too high or too low for human ears to register except on the very border of the senses? Or was it mental rather than physical? But it was as if all the bulk of earth and rock exhaled, breathed, stirred into watchful wakefulness. And Hosteen knew that this was something totally beyond his experience, perhaps beyond the experience of any off-worlder—unless Widders had met this before him.
Beat, beat—in spite of his efforts of mind, will, and squirming body held tight in the vice grip of the warriors who marched with him—Hosteen could only resist that enchantment feebly. That he was able to recognize and fight it at all was, he thought, a slender defense. Beat, beat—feet, drums—And again the mountain sighed—sighed or drew in a breath of anticipation—which? This was no earth and rock but a beast crouched there waiting, such a beast as no human could imagine.
The stench of the burned stuff was stronger. Then there was a last crescendo from the united drums—a roll of artificial thunder echoing and reechoing from the heights. They stopped and stood where they were, facing upslope toward the unseen top of the mountain. Then, as the drums had acted as one, so did the torch bearers move, stamping their lights into the earth, leaving them all in the dark, with only the far stars pricking the cloudless sky.
There was not a sound as the last echoes of the drumbeats died. Would the beast who was the mountain make answer? Hosteen’s imagination presented him with a picture of that creature—sky-high—waiting—Waiting as Surra could wait, as Baku could wait, with the great patience that man has lost or never had, the patience of the hunter.
The waiting Norbies—the waiting mountain—and waiting prisoners—
Again that breath, that sound that could not be heard, only felt with each atom of his tense body.
Then—
Lightning—great, jagged, broken blades of lightning stabbing up into the sky, lighting the slope. It played about the round knob that Hosteen saw for the first time clearly as the cres
t of the mountain—knob, one part of mind remaining undazzled told him, that was too round to be natural. A crown of lightning about the rock head of a crouching beast. Then—the whips of blazing light cracked down, cut and fired, and the smoke of those fires carried to the waiting throng. Crack, lash—but behind that was no natural force but intelligent purpose. Hosteen was sure of that as he stood blinded by the flashes.
Xik—this could not be Xik. The installations that must govern this display were no Xik flamers, nor anything he had seen or heard of on other worlds. Yet Hosteen’s mind balked at associating this weapon for horrible destruction with the same civilization that had produced the beauty of the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens.
As swiftly as it had begun, it was over. Brush was in flames at widely separated places on the upper slopes, but the fires did not spread far. And now the drums began once again their marching tap. Hosteen’s guards pushed him ahead. However, this time the bulk of the villagers remained where they were, only the local Chief, his guards, the Drummer, and their captives climbed anew.
Once more they passed the burned frame of the ’copter. The recent fiery lashes must have struck it again, for the tail assemblage was now a molten mass, glowing as the metal slowly cooled. Past the ’copter—on and up—
Gorgol, Surra, Baku—had they somehow escaped both the nets of the natives and the lightning? Hosteen tried to call again, only to meet that curious deadness in response, as if there had never been any way he could communicate with those intelligent brains so different from his own.
“LB just ahead,” Logan called out.
Hosteen sniffed the sickly sweet smell of decay—decay of vegetable and animal matter—the sacrifices, if sacrifices they were meant to be. And were he and Logan now being taken to join those? The Terran knew a trick or two he could use at the last, even with his arms bound—
The slaughtered horse was visible in the flicker of a dying brush fire, behind it the shape of the LB. And as Logan had reported, there were no signs of a fatal crash landing. The escape boat might have been set down as easily as if it landed on the mountainside by directing radar. Survivors? Or had the survivors already gone the path he and Logan were traveling?