Teesa took up her bow and strung it with an ease that still surprised Marc; it had only been a couple of weeks since the first time she touched one. Marc laid aside his improvised bowyer's tools and walked out of the hut, ducking his head under the rolled-up matting of its sides.
"Getting diplomatic again, eh?" Cynthia said, winking at him as she ran several of the locals through the art of trimming feathers to Retch arrows. "Going to do some more negotiations?"
"I am above your coarse suspicions," Marc said loftily.
He ignored her snicker. His ears did flush when she added:
"You're wearing a breechclout, man—everything shows. It's a certainty, not a suspicion."
The Cloud Mountain People learned quickly. Teesa waited; she already had a bracer for her left arm, a shooting glove on her right, and a tube of boiled hide slung over her back as a quiver. Leatherworking was another skill with which the Cloud Mountain People had no problems. The quiver even had an attractive decorative pattern of looping and running tendrils tooled into the surface. The arrows were a dense, hard, pale wood like ash, neatly fletched with colorful feathers and with beautifully worked triangular obsidian heads—and several of them were dipped in the deadly spider venom.
"Let us go and practice more!" she said eagerly. "This is a great thing!"
The warriors watching solemnly dipped their heads in the tribe's gesture for yes; some of them made a palm-down sweeping motion, one they used for emphasis. Most of them had their own bows now, and a few had made their own. He got the impression that the sort of concentrated effort they'd been putting in wasn't normal for them. They weren't farmers; hunting peoples usually worked in bursts, separated by long periods of ritual, song, storytelling, fooling around with things they did for fun, or just plain loafing. But for this, they were willing to work their asses off.
And not just for this. A little way off, a circle of them were watching Christopher Blair give a little lesson in unarmed combat. A young man went flying with a yell and thumped down on the mats of the improvised open-air dojo. Hoots and laughter followed, and Blair took his pupil-victim through the move more slowly. Somewhat to Marc's surprise, he'd turned out to be a good teacher, patient and cheerful… at least with the Cloud Mountain folk.
Makes you wonder… where has the sour, arrogant Blair of old gone? he thought. Maybe it's love.
Tahyo jumped up eagerly and followed them, tail wagging. I could swear he's gotten a third bigger in the month we've been here, Marc thought, thumping the broad head. A little of the gangly skinniness had left the animal, and his neck and shoulders were beginning to develop bands of muscle and the first faint bristle of the adult mane. The greatwolf's tongue lolled over his terrible steak knife teeth as he grinned up at Marc. A pat from Teesa was accepted with equanimity. Tahyo was still young enough to have that but-of-course-everyone-loves-me puppy/cub reflex, since he was designed to grow up in a pack's warm bath of affection.
"You have given my people more than this," she said, holding up the bow for an instant.
"What, then?" Marc answered in her own language.
"You have given us hope," she said gravely. "Now we will not lose the memory of our holy places, our long home."
The long, sloping meadow this camp of the Cloud Mountain folk used for target practice was littered with big basalt rocks, the occasional low-growing tree, and patches of brush. That was deliberate; they wanted training to be as realistic as possible. Marc heartily approved. Nice, round bull's-eye targets were seldom edible, and in his experience never attacked with intent to kill and/or eat you. Instead, they used wood or wicker outlines of probable targets—antelope, a saber-tooth, several different varieties of small-to-medium-sized 'saurs, and a startlingly realistic Neanderthal, which he'd thought for one queasy-making moment was a real one, stuffed. Teesa put an arrow to the string of her bow.
"Like this," Marc said, standing behind her, even though it was no longer strictly necessary to correct her stance. "Draw…"
Halfway through the second hour she shook out her right arm, flexing the shoulder. "I had better stop now. Any more and I would be learning bad habits. I will not become skilled in one day."
Marc nodded soberly, his respect for her wits going up a notch. She walked downslope, towards the river and the woods; he followed, and Tahyo cast back and forth as he trotted ahead of them. The Terran envied the greatwolf. To him, things were as they were; as long as he had Marc and enough to eat he took each moment as it came, letting the past vanish and looking forward to an interesting smell or sight.
"Let us go walk in the meadows by the river," she went on.
Not that there aren't interesting sights around here, he thought, watching Teesa's swaying walk, which the local garb showed off to best advantage.
"Down, boy," he muttered to himself, watching the shapely muscles clench and unclench. "It's not enough you're stranded thousands of miles from home, and that you've just discovered the most dangerous secret in the history of the human race, but you want to get into that sort of trouble, eh?"
Worse, when Teesa threw a smile at him over her shoulder, he had an uneasy sense that she knew exactly where his gaze had been directed.
"So," he said, trying to change the—unstated—subject, "the Wergu took the Cave of the Mysteries away from your folk?"
"In my mother's time." She nodded, serious again. "They came from the south, from the high mountains; no one knows why. Many and many of them"—she made a gesture of opening and closing both hands—"beyond counting, fierce and full of hate for all true-men. They took the sacred valley and the caves where we had dwelt from time out of mind, and the places roundabout where the other clans of our people lived. Many of us were killed: my mother's mate, my sire, and many-many. Since then we have dwindled; those were good lands, easy to protect from the animals-of-scale-and-feather—"
'Saurs, he translated mentally.
"—and with good soil for gardens, and many other things." She touched the necklace of gold nuggets on her bosom. "And there was the heavy metal, which we traded to the coast dwellers for many things, bronze tools and weapons. Above all, there we could do the proper rites that made our Ancestor Spirits strong to protect us and brought the favor of the Gods. There we had much time for making things that were beautiful and useful, or pleasing to the Gods, and for rituals and song."
Her face lit as she described it… described, he realized, as a lost paradise she'd never seen herself. Then she sighed sadly.
"Since then we are becoming mere rude hunters, like the highlanders or the tribes to the east."
Marc nodded gravely. Looks like Blair was right, he thought. High-level hunter-gatherer, pretty well sedentary already, and just beginning to hit the Neolithic, on the fringe of civilization.
That was hard for humans here, with ten-ton critters to keep off the crops. It was probably no accident that the only civilization this planet had produced so far had arisen on the northern coast of the northernmost continent. Whatever they'd been like back on Earth—and the paleontologists were still arguing about that—the biggest 'saurs here weren't endothermic, warm-blooded. The smaller varieties with feathers were warm-blooded, hideously active all year round, and an infernal nuisance, but the titanosaurs and other massive types mostly stayed south of the mountains or migrated in through the passes only in summertime, which kept down the numbers of elephant-sized predators following them. That seasonal presence was bad enough, together with the hordes of meat-eating flying things that the thicker air and lighter gravity made possible.
I've thought before that this planet isn't really suited to human beings, Marc mused. But then, if we're right, it really isn't. It's a zoo.
He didn't really like thinking about that. It gave him a sick, cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. They'd come to Venus—Mars, too—as explorers at the cutting edge of the human story. When he considered what the world would be like if Cynthia's theory was true… well, it was a lot less glamorous to be someone who'd ju
st paddled his dugout canoe into Manhattan and was getting the first chill realization that the skyscrapers weren't natural.
With an effort, he pushed the musings aside. Until the Terrans had more information, it just wasn't worth the effort to keep the mental wheels spinning pointlessly.
They came to the side of the river; it was a hill stream, about ten yards across, mostly fairly shallow above a bed of colorful egg-sized rocks, but with the odd deeper pool. They sat below a stretch of rapids—or a man-high waterfall—where willowlike trees and live oaks provided shade, but not so much that there was no breeze to keep the bugs down. Teesa put her arms around her knees and watched the falling water for a while; Marc leaned back on his elbow and watched her—or, when he felt too self-conscious doing that, watched Tahyo chasing dragonflies. Some of them were big enough to give him a bit of a fight, and made gruesome crunching and squishing sounds when he ate them, but they kept the other flying beasties down around here.
Mind you, watching them catch and eat small birds was sort of disturbing.
After a moment Teesa spoke: "I am made…"—she used a word that could mean yearning or uneasy depending on the context.
"Why?" he said quietly.
"For all our generations, we Cloud Mountain People tended our gardens, hunted, wrought tools and houses, raised our children, did honor to our ancestors and the Gods, and this we thought was as life would always be in the world of men."
His mind did a mental skip; the term meant two-footed ones. It was worse than thinking in a foreign language, more like having his concepts switched on him without warning.
"We were the greatest of all tribes, because we had the Diadem of the Eye and the Cave of the Mysteries. Even when the beastmen came and drove us away, we knew that if we could but take our heritage back, then all would be as it was."
She turned her head and looked at him. "But now you come, Marc, you and your Sky People, and suddenly all that we have and are… it seems so small. You tell me stories of worlds beyond the sky, and mysteries deeper than any of ours, and the knowledge I took with the Diadem of the Eye shows me that this is true—truer than perhaps I can grasp with the fingers of my self. If you go… if you go away, will this world of ours seem ever after small and dull and far away from the things that move the worlds? Like a small cave, after you came through with a torch."
Despite himself, Marc chuckled. She frowned and asked, "Why do you laugh: because we are so much less than you?"
He shook his head. "No! Because I tell you, this Diadem of the Eye, the Cave of the Mysteries… these are things that daunt us. They are beyond our ken and fill us with fear and wonder. And I was just thinking within myself how our pride is put down by that."
Teesa chuckled in her turn. "Yet from what you say—what the Night Face and her man say—these aren't really ours, the way we thought."
She made a whirling gesture with one hand. "And we ourselves, our first ancestors, were brought here from your world beyond the sky, your Earth, the blue star."
"By beings whose arts are as far beyond ours as ours beyond yours—further."
Her mouth had a rueful twist. "How? You too can travel between the lights-in-the-sky, you say."
Marc pointed northward. "From there, on the edge of the great salt water, this land looks high—like that."
Now his arm swung around to the south, where the fangs of mountains higher than Everest floated on the horizon, whiter than salt.
Teesa frowned. Her face had an odd innocence when she concentrated like that, and he had to restrain an impulse to reach out and smooth the lock of blond hair back from her brow with a hand. Slowly, she spoke:
"As a babe might think a toddler of three seasons and an adult much the same because both had learned to walk?"
"Very much," he said. "You are as wise as you are beautiful, Teesa of the Cloud Mountain folk."
She shook off her mood and smiled. "They have sweet-tongued men on the blue star, then, with words like the honey you find in an old tree."
He leaned closer. Some distant part of his mind was yammering about doctrine and consequences and a number of other things. The turquoise eyes came closer…
And she was past him. "We should swim!" she said, from the edge of the pool.
Two swift movements and she'd skinned out of the halter and taken the water in a clean running dive.
He followed suit—jumping into the water even faster than she had; the one real merit of the Cloud Mountain breechclout was that you could shed it quickly. He was grinning as he came up and saw her sleeking back her hair under the waterfall, looking at him out of the corners of her eyes. The white water foamed around her shoulders, and…
"Some things don't change between planets," he muttered.
That was a pose he'd seen more than once in a teenager's favorite recreational graphics. And very effective, when a woman wanted to get someone's motor racing and had a waterfall handy. Which hadn't actually happened to him in real life before, but there was a first time for everything. Their eyes met and they both laughed in mutual understanding.
"Mmmm," Teesa said, her head lying on his shoulder.
"Mmmm," Marc replied, grinning up at the hazy blue of the sky and pulling a stem of grass to chew on.
I suppose my pa would have smoked a cigarette, he thought. Though it's not worth the way he died, him.
"It has been many seasons," Teesa said sleepily. Then she laughed; he could feel her breath on the wet skin of his chest. "For you also—unless you are truly a wirdvas."
That meant something like a male succubus known for insatiable appetite and stamina; he grinned harder at the compliment. Not far away, Tahyo was waiting with heavy patience, chin on the ground—and a rope leash tying him to a small tree. A curious cold, wet nose was not what you wanted applied to sensitive parts of your anatomy at some of life's more intense moments.
I guess she really likes me, Marc thought. She didn't crack up when I jumped and yelled.
Although he would have liked a blanket for the time spent on land. Even soft spring grass could get sort of prickly.
A voice broke through his reverie. Teesa looked up at him, puzzled, as he sprang up; then her face changed as she heard it, too. They sprang for clothes and weapons, scrambling to dress.
"The beastmen! The beastmen come!" Zore shrilled. "Quickly, quickly!"
Marc had never seen Teesa so shaken. She pulled the silvery circlet from her brow and turned to him, her turquoise eyes enormous in her amber face.
"Nothing!" she said, her voice low and rapid. "I cannot see… feel… there is nothing! It is as if the Diadem of the Eye has been—" She swallowed and dropped into English. "Turned off."
Marc cast his mind back to his last sight of Franziskus Binkis. "I think that may be just what's happened," he said. "But you have to act as if it hasn't, Teesa. You must, or your people will lose heart."
And we'll all die, he didn't add aloud. Besides, I really do like these folk.
The command group stood on the lip of the hill, with the hollow holding the village behind them. The land rolled northward, falling in a tumble of bare ridges and forested slopes. The nursing mothers, the pregnant, the children, and the old were already gone, running for the hiding spots in the hills that had been prepared against this chance—save for a few near-adolescents like Zore, ready to take messages. The fifty or sixty warriors were massed on the slope below. A thread of smoke stood tall in the sky behind him, signaling the other Cloud Mountain settlements that enemies were come.
Hopefully, they'd answer.
Teesa nodded crisply and put the Diadem of the Eye back around her brow; only Marc was close enough to hear the strain in her voice, or see the prickle of sweat that broke out on her brow. It must be shattering, to have the certainties of a lifetime disappear—as if a devout Catholic had suddenly lost faith in the Mass.
"Warriors!" she shouted. "Once again we face our ancient enemy. But this time we have strong friends, with new weapons!"
&
nbsp; The Cloud Mountain warriors cheered. Good men, Marc thought—and that included the scattering of unwedded women. They've been beaten before, but they're ready to try again.
They shook weapons in the air as they shouted; many of those were their new shamboo longbows. Others drummed war spears on their shields, a harsh, booming sound through the sough of the wind and the cries of the birds that burst out of the trees around them.
Marc looked aside at his Terran counterparts. "What's wrong with this picture?" he asked.
"What did that old French dude say?" Cynthia replied.
"Old French dude?" Blair asked.
"Talleyrand." She cocked a thin, sardonic brow at her lover. "I did take, history as well as paleontology, Chris."
"Sorry. Ah, when he was briefing his staff for the negotiations after Napoleon's fall. And above all, gentlemen, no zeal."
"Yeah," Marc replied. "That was more or less what I had in mind. Now we've got them all hot en colaire, we've got to make 'em remember it's not how hard you fight, it's how smart you fight, that counts."
He glanced at the contorted faces, the feathered headbands, the patterned hide shields.
The Sky People Page 24