by Andre Norton
“So – not swallowin’ Dumaroy’s talk about the terrible, terrible Norbies, I came up to have a look around for myself. I chose the wrong time – or maybe the right, if we consider it from another angle – and found the- trail of a big herd bein’ driven straight back into the mountains where they had no business to be. And, bein’ slightly stupid as my father likes to point out occasionally, I just followed hoofprints along until I was collared. A simple story – with me the simplest item in it.
Then these gentle Xiks thought maybe I could supply some bits of information that they considered necessary to their future well bein’. Some things I honestly didn’t know and, while they were tryin’ to encourage my reluctant tongue, somebody pulled a raid on their horse corral and rather disrupted things. I believe that they had considered their situation entirely safe here and that when they were attacked they came unlaced at the seams for a few minutes. I took advantage of a very lucky break and headed for the hills. Then Gorgol here stumbled on me and so – you know the rest.”
He waved a bandaged hand and added in a far more serious tone, “What you don’t know – and what is goin’ to hurry us out of here – is that we’re sittin’ right on the edge of a neat little war. These Xiks have been deliberately stirrin’ up trouble to set the settlers and the Norbies at each others’ throats. Whether it’s just that they thrive on pure meanness, or whether they have some plans of their own that can only be ripened in a war, is anybody’s guess. But they are plannin’ a full-sized raid on the range below the Peaks, disguised as Norbies. And in turn a couple of raids on Norbie huntin’ camps doublin’ as settlers. I don’t know whether you know about the Nitra tribe or not. But they’re not the type any man with any sense excites. And the Xiks have been twistin’ their tails regularly – in a manner of speakin’ – pushin’ them straight into a stampede that might smash every spread on the Peak Range. Get the Norbies mad enough and they’ll unite in a continent-wide drive. Then” – he waved his hand again – “good-by to a pretty decent little world. With all the best intentions in the galaxy the Peace Officers will have to call in the Patrol. There’ll either be guerrilla warfare for years, with the Norbies against everythin’ from off-world – or else no Norbies. And since I believe that the Norbies are a pretty fine lot, I’m just a little bit prejudiced. So now we’re faced with a big job, fella. We have to try and stop the war before the first shot is really fired!”
12
The pattern fitted, not only with the situation as Storm already knew it, but with tactics the Xiks had used elsewhere in the galaxy. The enemy had apparently learned nothing from their defeat, and were starting their old games over again. Did this handful of holdouts believe Arzor was going to furnish them with a nucleus for a new empire? Yet that vision was no more grandiloquent than the one they had always held and that the Confederacy had had to expend every effort to defeat. Storm sighed. There had been no end after all to the conflict that had wiped Terra from the solar map.
“How many Xiks are there?” He was already occupied with the practical side of the matter.
Logan Quade shrugged, let out a little involuntary yelp of pain, and then added:
They kept me busy, a little too busy to count noses. Five in the bunch that first downed me. But all of those weren’t alien –at least two were outlaws of our own breed. And there was an officer of sorts in command of the questionin’. Him I want to meet again!” The hands in their bandage mittens moved on Logan’s knees. “I saw maybe a dozen aliens – about half as many outlaws – they don’t mix too well –”
They wouldn’t.” The Xiks had had human stooges on other worlds, but it was always an uneasy cooperation and seldom worked. “How many settlers in the Peak country?”
There’re seven ranges staked out. Dumaroy’s the largest so far. He has his brother, nephew, and twelve riders. Lancin –Artur – he has a smaller holdin’ – though his brother’s comin’ out to join him as soon as he’s mustered out of the Service. They have five Norbies ridin’ for them. And our range – six Norbies and two riders m” father sent up from the Basin. Maybe ten-twelve men can be combed out of the small outfits. Not a very big army – at least you’ll figure that after being with the Confed forces –”
“I’ve seen successful move-ins accomplished by even fewer,” Storm returned mildly. “But your Peak people must be pretty well scattered –”
“Just let me get to the first of the line cabins and there’ll be a talker to call ‘em in. We aren’t so primitive as you off-worlders seem to think!”
“And that line cabin – how far away?”
“I’d have to take a looksee from some height around here. This is new territory as far as I’m concerned. I’d guess – maybe two day’s easy ridin’ – fifteen hours if you pushed with a good mount under you.”
“Rain’s about the only one of those we have. And there’ll be a pack of Xiks out to nose our trail.” Storm wasn’t arguing, he was simply stating the odds as he saw them. “Also, we haven’t yet found a way out of this valley that we can take a horse over. The road in was blocked by a landslide.”
“I don’t care how we do it,” Logan fired back. “But I’m tellin’ you, Storm, it has to be done! We can’t let Dumaroy and the Norbies mix it up just to please those Xiks! I was born on Arzor and I’m not throwin’ this world away if it’s at all possible to save it!”
“If it’s at all possible to save it –” echoed Storm, the old chill of loss eating into him.
“Yes, you, more than all of us, know what those Xiks can do when they play the game according to their rules.”
Storm turned now to Gorgol and his fingers outlined as much of Logan’s story as he could find the proper movements to explain. He ended with the question that meant the most now:
There is a way out of valley for man – horse?”
“If there is – Gorgol find.” The Norbie stripped two of the small birds from his roasting spits, tucked them into a broad leaf and gathered them up. “I go look –” He scrambled over the barrier and was gone.
“You been long on Arzor?” Logan asked as Storm divided up the other birds and brought Quade’s portion to him.
“A little over a month – my time –”
“You’ve settled down quickly,” the other commented. “I’ve seen men born here who can’t make finger-talk that fast or accurately –”
“Perhaps it comes easier because my own people once had a sign language to use with strangers. Here – let me manage that.”
The bandaged hands were making clumsy work of eating and Storm sat down beside Logan, to feed him bite by bite from the point of his knife. Surra blinked at them in drowsy content and Hing draped herself affectionately over Logan’s outstretched legs.
“Where did you get the animals – they’re off-world? And that trained bird of yours – what is it?” the younger man asked as Storm paused to dismember another grass hen.
“I’m a Beast Master – and these are my team. Baku, African Black Eagle, Surra, dune cat, Ring, meerkat. They are all natives of Terra, too. We lost Hing’s mate in the flood –”
“Beast Master!” There was open admiration in the tone, even if the battered features could not mirror it. “Say – what is this Dineh you spoke of earlier –?”
“I thought you did not understand Navajo!” Storm countered.
Now those blue eyes were very bright. “Navajo,” Logan repeated thoughtfully, as if trying to remember where he might have heard the word before. He put up his mittened hand to the ketoh on Storm’s wrist, and then lightly touched the necklace that swung free as the other offered him more food. Those are Navajo, aren’t they?”
Storm waited. He had an odd feeling that something important was coming out of this. “Yes.”
“My father has a bracelet like this one –”
That was the wrong thing, the words pushed Storm into remembering what he had avoided these past few weeks. Involuntarily he jerked away from Logan’s hand, got to his feet.
<
br /> “Your father” – the Terran spoke gently, quietly, very remotely, though there was danger under the veneer of that tone – “is not Navajo!”
“And you hate him, don’t you?” Logan said without accusation. He might have been commenting upon the darkness of the night without. “Brad Quade has a lot of enemies – but not your sort of man usually. No, he’s not Navajo – he was born on Arzor – but of Terran stock – He is part Cheyenne –”
“Cheyenne!” Storm was startled. It was easier to think of Quade, the enemy, as coming from the old, arrogant, all-white stock who had lied, cheated, pushed his people back and back – though not into the nothingness the white man wanted for them. No – never into nothingness!
“Cheyenne – that’s Amerindian –” Logan was starting to explain when he was interrupted.
Surra was on her feet, her drowsy content gone as if she had never sprawled half-asleep a moment earlier. And Storm reached swiftly for the blaster he had taken from the pass guard. It was Xik issue but enough like a Confed weapon for him to use. He only wished he had more than one clip for it, but the invaders must be running low on ammunition themselves.
It was Gorgol who squeezed through and the news he brought was not good. Not only had he been unable to prospect for another exit from the valley, but there was a Nitra war party camped in the southern end of the flooded land, and lights showed to the north along the cliffs.
”The horses,” Storm decided first, “and water. Get the mounts in here and as much water as we can store. Perhaps we can sit out a search and the Xiks may tangle with those Nitra –”
They worked fast, dousing the fire and widening the opening so that Rain and the three horses from the other valley could be brought into the cave. On their return they found Logan on his feet, using Storm’s torch and exploring into the dark tunnel they had all avoided earlier.
“I wonder,” he speculated, “whether this hole couldn’t run on through the mountain. This might not have been one of the regular Sealed Caves but a passage from one valley to the next. You say you got into this valley through a tunnel – well, couldn’t this one be the way out?”
But Storm eyed the dark hole in which the beam of the torch was so quickly lost with no favour at all. The air was dead the farther one moved in from the entrance, and he had a feeling that to go into that unknown region would be merely to walk to one’s death. Unless he were driven to it he would have no part of such exploration.
“Queer air –” Logan limped on, one supporting hand against the wall. “Seems to be dead – light plays tricks here too.”
And Storm noticed that the horses were huddling together in the middle of the expanse, showing no desire to push into the tunnel – that Surra avoided the dark mouth of the place and Hing, whose curiosity had led her in the past to the most reckless venturing, did not patter along at Logan’s heels, but sat on her haunches, rocking from side to side, her pointed nose high, making snuffling noises of suspicion.
With Gorgol, the Terran set about building up the front of the cave, obliterating hoof prints as far back as the edge of the water. Then they loaded to the brim the three canteens and Gorgol’s water carrier of lizard skin. From the edge of the still shrinking lake Storm saw those dots of light along the cliffs. If the Xiks had discovered the body of the guard, they might well be more cautious about advancing in the dark.
It was the middle of the night when the fugitives stopped their work of disguising the cave and crawled into hiding. It seemed to Storm, as he settled down to get what sleep he could, that the inert atmosphere of the place was expelling the fresh air that came in through a small opening they had left. And, when he closed his eyes and could no longer sight that scrap of sky, his imagination presented a picture of his being fastened in some box he could not batter open.
“Sealed Caves’ – he had always thought that that name had been given because they were actually walled up. But now he could believe that that which sealed them was inherent in the caves themselves. Reason told Storm that they were doing the best thing now, that if they could stay undercover until he and Gorgol, scouting the hills, found a path out, they would have better than a fifty-fifty chance. But his body was tense, every nerve in him resisted holding up here.
Morning came and the three in hiding discovered that the cave had one good property besides offering concealment – it was cool, while the sun in the valley was a bright glare generating dank heat. Logan wriggled up to share Storm’s lookout.
“Big dry’s comin’ early this year,” he remarked. “Sometimes works that way when the storms in the mountains are too heavy early in the season. We’ve more than one reason for gettin’ out of here on the gallop.”
“The Survey party crossed a river coming in,” Storm replied. “High with rainfall, of course, but would it dry up entirely?”
“The Staffa, no. But that runs pretty far south of this region, rises in the East Peak country. I don’t know about this other one you mention. To try to make the Staffa and trail it out would just about double your ridin’ time and you’d be in the edge of the Nitra raidin’ country –”
“Then we had better make our break soon –” Storm stopped almost in mid-word as the fan-shaped piece of valley he could sight from his vantage point was suddenly peopled. Through his lenses those distant figures leaped into clear detail. They were wearing Norbie corselets and boot leggings, but they had not taken the trouble to continue the deception farther than their clothing. That pale greenish skin, the lank, bleached hair hanging in curled rats’ tails down to their shoulders in the back, marked two of the riders as Xiks, while their three companions were plainly of the settler race. Two of the latter had bows, but the former were armed with off-world weapons. And one of them bore across his saddle a tube of dead white colour.
Storm had accepted the presence of slicers, the blaster he now half lay upon, the force beam he had seen at its deadly work in the other valley. But still he jibbed at the white tube and what it meant. There were few enough of them, a development produced so close to the end of the war that it had never been in wide use. And certainly the last place the Terran would expect to see it carried casually on horseback was here in the wastes of a frontier planet. Two, captured in outposts so quickly overrun by Confed forces that the defenders had not been able to blow them up and so avoid surrender, had been tested on barren asteroids. And, witnessing the result, the Con-fed command had ordered that all others found were to be destroyed at once.
The tubes could be used, yes – and the results would be disastrous to the enemy before their sights – only there was in addition an upredictable backlash of energy, though it might not affect the Xiks as adversely as it did the Confed force that tested the weapons. Built on a principle not unlike that of the disrupters, used to dispose of inanimate material, the tubes were far more powerful than any Confed disrupter of three times their size and range.
“More trouble?” Logan asked.
Storm held out the lenses, steadying them for the other.
“See that tube on the second horse – that’s the worst trouble I know.” The Terran added what he had heard about that weapon.
“Coin’ to make sure of somebody – or somebodies,” commented the Arzoran dryly. “I don’t particularly care for Nitra warriors. We’ve had our differences, and until you have a Nitra double-barbed arrow cut out of you, fella, you don’t know just how much you can sweat over a little knife work. No – I’ve never felt kindly toward Nitras. But any disputes we’ve had have been on a more or less even basis. Usin’ that tube against Norbies’s more like puttin’ up a grass hen against your Surra and tyin’ the hen’s feet into the bargain.”
Storm made signs for Gorgol, repeating as well as he could the information about the Xik weapon. The Norbie nodded that he understood and watched the riders round the lake, to be hidden by a series of mounds linked together by a brush wall.
“Nitra there”- last night. Maybeso not so now. Nitra do not wait like bug one sets
foot upon! This evil thing – better we take it –”
“Not so,” Storm returned regretfully. “Made only to be used by evil men – we touch – we killed!” He used the most emphatic of the death signs.
The rider with the tube appeared on the far side of the end mound. He dismounted, with none of the easy grace of a settler or the litheness of a Norbie, but in a scrambling way that informed Storm that to the alien the animal he had bestridden was merely a means of transportation and no more. Seeing that, the Terran could understand better how the Xiks had been able to cut down the frightened animals in the other valley undisturbed by the brutality of the act.
Having shouldered the tube, the invader climbed to the top of the mound and set about the business of putting together the rubble there to form a base for it. He moved expertly but with no hurry. Yet Storm did not miss that flash through the air, was able to pick out with the aid of the lenses the arrow, head down and still quivering, planted in the soil just a foot short of its target. But that must have been a specially lucky shot as no more arrows hit the mound.
The Nitra are shooting.” Storm passed the lenses again to Logan.
“Poor devils,” the other commented, “they must be cornered –they wouldn’t take such a chance unless they were.”
The other riders burst into sight, with the outlaws well to the fore, urging their mounts in a retreat that held panic as part of its haste.