The Beast Master bm-1

by Andre Norton

  They have places on some worlds,” Logan pursued his own explanation, “where they keep wild animals – call ‘em zoos. It looks to me as if this place were meant to keep specimens of vegetation from a lot of different planets. One, two, three, four,” he counted the separate plots about them. “And these are just about as different from each other as you can get.”

  He was right, Storm could agree to that. Gorgol put out a hand and touched with gentle hesitation one of the ivory stems that had supported the flying flowers. He withdrew his fingers and sniffed at them with some of the same pleasure Surra had shown when she drank in the perfume of the purple cups.

  Surra? Storm glanced around, seeking the cat. But she was gone, vanished somewhere into this scented wilderness. He sat down at the foot of the pine, leaning his back against its trunk, his hands flat against the earth that felt like home earth, moist, but firm under his flesh. He could close his eyes now to the riot of those other gardens and their weird beauty, or look up into the tent of green over him and be back again –

  Gorgol and Logan drifted away. Storm was glad to be alone. Slowly he slid down the length of the pine bole until he was curled on a mat of needles and he slept, dreamlessly, completely relaxed, though the semblance of day about him never changed to evening.

  “– biggest mixture you ever saw.” Logan lay on his back, sharing the bed under the pine, while Gorgol dug his fingers back and forth through the same needle padding, shifting the brown harvest of years. It was still day by the light, though they must have been many hours in the cavern.

  “I’d say,” the Arzoran settler continued, “that a whole mountain was hollowed out to hold this. We counted about sixty different gardens – including two which are mostly water. And then there are the fruit orchards and vines –” He gestured at the remains of their recent meal, a small collection of pits and rinds. “I tell you – this is fabulous!”

  “No animal life –?”

  “Birds, insects – no animals, except that cat of yours. We caught her rolling in a big patch of grey mossy stuff and acting as if she were wild. Ran away from us as if we were Xiks stalkin’ her with one of those pop guns of theirs.”

  “But how could all this keep growing without any attention for years, maybe centuries?” marvelled Storm. “You are right, it is, it must have been intended as a botanical garden of specimens gathered from all over the galaxy. This’ – he pulled a curl of flame-orange rind between his fingers – “was an Astran “golden apple”. And the black and white berries were from Sirius Three. But you’d think the place would have grown into a wilderness when it was left. Something continued to control it, kept the growth right, nourished everything properly –”

  “Maybe the light is part of it,” Logan suggested. “Or the atmosphere. I’ve noticed one thing.” He held out his hand. The bandages were gone and the wounds and burns Storm had tended were not only closed, they were almost healed.

  “Show him your arm,” Logan signed to Gorgol and the Norbie presented his wounded forearm for inspection. The arrow tear was only a reddish mark, and the native used the limb freely with no sign of discomfort.

  “How do you feel?” Logan demanded of Storm.

  The Terran stretched. He had not really noticed before but, now that Logan had drawn the matter to his attention, he was aware that the weight of exhaustion that had ridden him into this Eden was gone. In fact Storm had not awakened so contented with life for a long time – for years. Like Surra he wanted to roll on the ground and purr his pleasure aloud.

  “See?” Logan did not seem to expect an articulate answer.

  “It’s in the air here, all around us. Growth – making us feel alive and vigorous, healed of our hurts, too. Perhaps this place was designed for other uses besides just botanical display.”

  “Does it also have a door out?”

  “We found three doors,” Logan returned. Two are grills, but the third looks the most promisin’.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it has been walled up. The legends of the Sealed Caves suggest it might be an outlet to the outside –”

  Storm supposed he should get up and go to inspect that doorway. But for the first time in years a kind of languorous laziness held him in its grip. Just to lie here under the pine, to watch Rain and the other horses at their ease, Logan and Gorgol beside him as relaxed as himself, none of them driven by a need for immediate action – it was wonderful, perfect! He and the others had found a small section of Paradise, why be in a hurry to leave it?

  Gorgol sat up, brushed the pine needles from the fringes of his belt. He turned his head, gazing about him with a slow measurement and within Storm a faint, very faint apprehension awoke.

  The native’s yellow-red fingers moved in short sweeps, with pauses between, as if the importance of what he had to say was making the Norbie doubly careful of his choice of signs.

  “This – trap – big trap.”

  14

  “Trap?” repeated Logan without much interest. But the languor that held Storm was pierced by a fast-growing doubt. Perhaps because he had known a variety of traps – and very ingenious ones – in the past, the Terran did not only listen but was receptive to such a warning.

  “What manner of trap?” he signed.

  “You like here – happy –” Gorgol was plainly groping for signs to convey a complicated idea. “No go – want to stay –”

  Storm sat up. “You no want to stay?” he asked.

  Gorgol looked about him again. “Good –” He touched the remains of the fruit. “Good!” He drew an exaggeratedly deep breath of the perfume-laden air. “Feel good!” He gave an all embracing twirl of his fingers. “But – not mine –” He ran those fingers through the pine needles. “Not mine –” He flicked the fingers to include the other gardens about them. “No Gorgol place here – not hold Gorgol –” Again he was trying to make limited signs explain more abstract thought. “Your place – hold you –”

  The Norbie had something! That alerting signal far inside Storm was clamouring more loudly. What better bait for a trap than a slice of a man’s home planet served up just when he believed that world lost forever? Even if a trap were not intended, it was here just the same. He got to his feet, tramped determinedly away from the pine.

  “Where’s that built-up door of yours?” he demanded harshly over his shoulder, refusing to look back at that wedge of temptation set in familiar green.

  “You think Gorgol’s right?”

  “You don’t think about things such as that,” Storm answered out of the depths of experience, “you feel! Maybe those who built this place didn’t intend it for a trap –” He slapped Rain’s flank, making the stallion move from the grass to the roadway that separated the small piece of Terra from its neighbour.

  “Surraaaaa –” Storm shouted that aloud, an imperative summons that he had only had to use once or twice in their close comradeship. And his voice awoke echoes above and around the gardens, while birds flew and flower-coloured insects floated, disturbed, to settle again.

  Leading Rain by the headstall, the Terran started down the path. The sooner he was away from that bit of his native earth the better. Already a new bitterness was beginning to fester in him and he turned it against the enemy outside. So the Xiks thought they had finished Terra? Perhaps – but they had not finished Terrans!

  He hurried, deliberately twisting and turning from path to path, trying to muddle his own trail, so that he could not easily find his way back to that pine-roofed spot. Twice more he called the dune cat. Hing pattered along behind him, stopping now and then to sniff inquisitively or dig, but perfectly willing to move, while the other horses followed Rain. They threaded the narrow roadways between gardens – such gardens. Twice Storm saw foliage he recognized, and both times they were samples from widely separated worlds.

  “Left through here” – Logan came up beside him – “around the end of this water place, then behind the one with the scarlet feather trees. I wonder wh
at kind of a world those are from? See – now you’re facing it.”

  Storm followed his directions. The scarlet plumes of the trees arched high against the duller red of the stone wall of the mountain interior. And the black path led directly to an archway that had been carefully bricked up with blocks about a foot square. The Terran could see none of the black sealing material, unless it was used as mortar to set those bricks. Under his hands the wall was immovable, and he examined it carefully, wondering what tool there was among their supplies that could best be used to attack it.

  Would the points of their belt knives make any impression on those cracks? He could turn on the blaster, but he was loathe to use up the charge in the most potent weapon they had. Best try knives first.

  At the end of a quarter of an hour, his hands slippery with sweat, his control over his temper hard pressed, Storm admitted that knives were not the answer. That left the blaster. It was not a disrupter, of course. But set to highest power it should act upon the blocks, if not upon the stuff that held them together.

  Sending the rest of the party back, Storm lay on the path, resting the barrel of the Xik weapon on several stones so that its sights were aligned with a point in the middle of the wall, directly below the highest rise of the arch. He pressed the release button and fought the answering kick of the weapon, holding it steady as Xik-made lightning struck full on the blocks.

  For seconds, perhaps a full minute, there was a flareback that beat at Storm with a wave of blast heat. Then a core of yellow showed at the centre point of the beam, the yellow spreading outward in a circle. The colour deepened. Harsh fumes spreading from that contact point made Storm cough, his eyes stream. But he held the blaster steady for another long moment before he started to depress the barrel slowly, drawing the yellow mark down in a line toward the floor.

  As the light began to pulse, he knew that the charge was nearing exhaustion. What if he had guessed wrong and thrown away the blaster without achieving their freedom? Storm held the weapon tensely while those pulsations grew more ragged, until the pressure of his finger on the firing button brought no response.

  To his vast disappointment the wall, save for that heat scar, looked as staunch as it had been on his first examination. He could not wait to know the truth. Reversing the blaster so its stock was a club, he ran forward in spite of the lingering heat, to thrust the butt into the scar with all the force of his weight and strength behind it.

  There was a shock that made the Terran grunt as the metal stock met the blocks. But it wasn’t the blaster that gave. A whole section where the flame had licked moved outward –perhaps not very much. But he had felt it give. Heartened he struck again. The section of blocks broke apart, not along the joints where they had been mortared together, but in the middle of the stone squares themselves – proving once again that the building material of the unknown aliens was more enduring than the products of nature.

  Before he attacked the second time Storm allowed the wall to cool. The fumes of the ray were gone, almost as if they had been sucked away or absorbed by some quality in the air of the garden cavern. A bush with a lacy covering quivered until its iridescent leaves shook, and Surra, her fur ruffled, her eyes glinting wild and feral, crawled from under it to the roadway and stood panting before Storm.

  He rubbed behind her ears, along the line of her pointed fox jaw, talking to her in that crooning speech that soothed her best. She was excited, over stimulated, and he marvelled that she had answered his call. One could never be sure with the felines, their independence kept them from being servants – companions, yes, and war comrades, but not servants to man. Each time Surra obeyed some order or summons Storm knew that obedience was by her will and not his. And he could never be sure whether his hold on her would continue. Now, under his gentling, she softened, purred, dabbing at his hands with a claw-sheathed paw. The alien trap had not taken Surra either.

  They plundered the fruit gardens for another meal, filled their canteens with purified water from a miniature waterfall in one of the lake lands and waited. Until, at last, with the three of them working, they were able to handle the cooled blocks and break their way through the barrier.

  Logan had been right in his surmise. No tunnel reached before them, only the mouth of another cave, and, beyond that, the light of Arzoran day. They led the horses one by one through that break, and Gorgol, who had gone out on a short scout, returned, his hands flashing in an excited message.

  This place I know! Here I slew the evil flyer when I went on my man hunt. There is a trail from this place –”

  They came out in a valley so narrow that it was merely a ravine between two towering heights. And the cut was so barren of vegetation that the sun trapped within those walls made a glaring furnace of the depths, so that the contrast between this sere outer world and the delights of the cavern was even more pronounced. On impulse Storm turned back to rebuild the barrier they had broken through, piling the crumbling blocks of stone across the opening. Logan joined in, his healing lips no longer so puffed that they could not shape a smile.

  “Let the sealed ones continue to keep their secrets, eh?” He laughed. This is too good a hiding hole to waste. We may have need of it again.”

  But how quickly that need was to come they did not dream. Gorgol mounted one of the mares and turned her to the southern end of the valley. Logan swung up bareback on a second horse, they having packed what was left of their supplies on the yearling. Storm was just about to settle himself on Rain’s pad saddle when Surra gave her battle cry, bounding ahead of the Norbie’s horse, to face the end of the valley, the hair along her backbone roughed, her ears flattened to her skull as she hissed defiance.

  Her hiss was answered twofold. Gorgol’s stun rod went up as a yellow-grey boulder detached itself from the general mass of rocks before them, produced driving feet, and charged in an insane rage before Storm understood what was happening.

  The yoris, meeting the beam of the stun ray head on, gave a choked scream and landed in a skidding heap while Gorgol fought his terrorized horse. The mare Logan was riding panicked, and her rider, still suffering from his beating, with no reins or saddle as an anchor, was thrown, rolling over just as a second yoris came out of a pocket in the cliff and screeched down to join its mate.

  Storm’s arrow hit a lucky mark, the soft underskin of the lizard’s throat, one of the giant reptile’s three vulnerable spots. But the thing was not killed outright. Snapping its murderous jaws, it beat against the ground, and Logan threw himself back with a cry, a red stream welling through his boot over the calf. Gorgol beamed the wounded lizard and it went limp. But the Norbie paid no heed to the yoris as he vaulted to Logan’s side.

  Young Quade had both hands clasped tightly about his leg just above that wound, his face very pale. He glanced up at Storm with an odd emptiness in the brilliant blue of his eyes.

  Gorgol drew his knife and cut a length of fringe from his belt. He worked the boot from Logan’s leg with a quick jerk that made the other catch his breath. With the cord of fringe he looped a tourniquet above the wound and then passed the ends to Storm to twist tight while he went to the yoris, prying open its mouth to peer within. That examination required only a second. The native stooped to slash at the middle of the lizard, ripping out a great hunk of fatty flesh. He ran back to clap it over the bloody gash on Logan’s leg.

  “Male” – Logan got the word out between set teeth – “poison –”

  Storm was cold inside. There was nothing in his depleted aid kit that could handle this. And he had heard tales of yoris poison, most of them grisly. But Gorgol was signing.

  “Draw poison out –” He gestured to the raw gob of lizard fat. “No ride, no walk – be quiet – sick, very sick soon –”

  Logan shaped a shadow of a smile. “He’s not just fanning his fingers when he says that.” His voice sounded oddly thick. “I think I’ve had it, fella –”

  The pallor that crept up under his brown skin was close to grey an
d his hands and arms jerked in spasmodic quivers that he apparently could not control. A small trickle of blood rilled from the corner of his swollen mouth.

  Gorgol went back to the yoris and cut a fresh strip of fat. He motioned to Storm to pull off the first poultice and slapped on the second. With the blood on the discarded lump there was a blue discolouration. The Norbie pointed to it.

  “Poison – it comes –”

  But could they hope to draw out all the venom that way, wondered Storm. Logan no longer twitched. His head had slumped forward on his chest and he was breathing in quick snorts, his ribs showing under the tight skin as the lungs beneath them laboured. His skin was clammy to the touch, with cold perspiration rising in great beads. Storm thought that he was no longer conscious.

  Four more times Gorgol changed that poultice of lizard flesh. The last time it came away without a trace of the blue stain. But Logan lay inert, his breathing very quick and shallow.

  “No more poison. Now he sleep –” the Norbie explained.

  “Will he wake?”

  Gorgol studied the unconscious rider. “Maybeso. No thing else to do. No ride, no walk, maybeso this many days –” He held up two fingers.

  “Look here,” Storm began aloud and then switched to signs. “You tell me how go – I find help – come back – you wait for me in place of growing things –”

  The Norbie nodded. “I keep watch – you bring help – tell also about evil ones –”

  Together they carried Logan back into the cavern and then Storm proceeded to strip down for a quick journey along the trail Gorgol drew in the dust for him to memorize. He would take Rain but not Surra. Perhaps he would find Baku outside. But he intended to set and keep a pace the cat could not match.

  At the last, he took only two of the canteens, a packet of iron rations, and his bow and arrows. Gorgol offered him back the stun rod and he hesitated, refusing it only because he knew the symbolic reliance the Norbie placed upon it. That, and the thought that the Xiks might just invade the valley outside and he had to leave Gorgol the best defence.