"There is," he said, "no other way of honor." He was mocking me.
"Speaking of honor," I said, "how do I know that when I get through killing you I will get the sphere?"
"You speak most lightly of killing me," he said.
"One of us must die," I told him.
"That is true," he said, "but it will be you."
"Just on the chance that you are wrong," I insisted, "how about the sphere?"
"In the unlikely event that you still live," he said, "it will be brought to you."
"And I'll be allowed to leave in peace?"
"You insult me," he said, in cold anger. "You insult my race."
"I am a stranger here," I said. "I do not know your race."
"We are honorable," he said, the words gritted through his teeth.
"In that case," I said, "let us proceed to business."
"The rules must be observed," he said. "Each of us will move back and turn around to face each other. You note the fabric on the pole?"
I nodded. Someone in the crowd of centaurs was holding up a pole with a dirty piece of cloth tied to it.
"When the symbol falls," he said, "the fight begins." I nodded and kicked Paint in the ribs to get him turned around. I rode a few paces, then turned Paint around again. The centaur also had turned around and we were facing one another. The pole with the dirty piece of cloth still was held on high. The centaur unsheathed his sword and I followed his example.
"Paint, old hoss," I said, "now we're in for it."
"Most honored sir," Paint told me, "I shall strive my utmost in our cause."
The pole with the dirty rag came down.
We rushed together. Paint was going full speed after the first two swings he made upon his rockers, and the centaur was thundering down upon us, his driving hoofs cutting great clots of earth out of the ground and throwing them behind him. He held his sword on high and his shield was raised above his head. As he charged toward us he let go with a strange shrill yodeling warwhoop that was enough to freeze the blood.
Not more than a couple of seconds could have elapsed between the time the flag had dropped and we were upon one another and in those two seconds (if it were two seconds) my suddenly busy mind thought of at least a dozen clever tricks by which I could outsmart my opponent, and as speedily dropped them all. In that last moment, I knew there was nothing I could do other than try to catch the blow of his sword upon my shield and to try, by whatever means presented itself, to get in a blow of my own.
My mind dropped its wild flurry of ideas and became a hard, cold block and a grimness settled on me and I knew that this was it. I had to finish him off quickly or he would finish me and the matter of my finishing him must depend largely upon luck, for I had no skill and no time to learn the skill.
I saw his sword coming down in a full-armed swinging stroke and I knew also that my sword was swinging at his head, driven by every ounce of strength I could muster in my arm. His eyes were half-closed and beady and his face wore a look of self-satisfied alertness.
For he knew he had me. He knew I had no chance. From many little things that he had noted, he must have sensed that I was no expert swordsman and was at an utter disadvantage.
His sword struck the edge of my shield so hard that my arm was numbed and the blade went skidding off it to go slicing past my shoulder. But even as this happened, he jerked suddenly, beginning to rear up and backward. A glazed look flitted across his face and the arm that held the shield dropped away and the edge of my sword came down squarely on top his head, driven with all the strength I had, slicing into his skull and bisecting his face to drive deep into his neck.
And in that instant before my blade had struck him, when his face had taken on that glazed look and his shield arm had sagged away, I had glimpsed the black hole which blossomed in his forehead, on a line between and just above his eyes. But I saw it only for a fraction of a second, for almost as soon as it appeared, the sword was slicing through it, almost as if it had been placed there to show me where to strike.
SIXTEEN
The brain case was nicked and battered. It had had hard usage.
I handed it down to Sara. "There it is," I said. "That was a hell of a chance you took."
She bristled at the anger in my voice. "It was no chance at all," she said. "The bullet goes where I aim the rifle and I am good at it. It worked out, didn't it?"
"It worked out just fine," I said, still shaken. "But two feet to one side . . ."
"It couldn't have," she said. "I aimed it . . ."
"Yeah, I know," I said. "Right in the center of his forehead."
I climbed down off Paint and shucked off the robe. Tuck was crouched at the foot of one of the twisted badlands trees. I tossed the robe to him.
"Where are my pants?" I asked.
"Over there," said Sara, pointing. "I picked them up and folded them."
I picked up the trousers and shook them out and started getting into them.
Sara had been turning the brain around and around in her band.
"What happened to it?" she asked. "What did they use it for?"
"What would you expect a bunch of polo-playing barbarians to use a brain case for?"
"You mean a polo ball?"
I nodded. "Now they'll have to go back to balls chiseled out of stone. They're all upset about it,"
Hoot came swarming down the slope from where he had been standing lookout.
"You perform excellent," he hooted at me. "For one wielding an unaccustomed weapon . . ."
"Miss Foster was the one who performed so excellently," I told him. "She bagged my bird for me."
"No matter which," said Hoot, "the deed be neatly done and the game-playing hobbies are evacuating."
"You mean that they are leaving?"
"They are forming up to march."
I climbed to the top of the hill and the centaurs had indeed formed into a ragged line and were marching west. It was a relief to see them go. Honorable as they might be (and they were honorable; they had given me the brain case) I still would have felt slightly nervous if they had hung around.
Turning back, I saw that Tuck and Sara had hauled Roscoe's body off the pile of water tins and were opening up his skull so they could insert the brain case.
"Do you think it has been damaged?" Sara asked. "The beating it has taken. Look at all the dents in it!"
I shook my head. I didn't know.
"He doesn't have to know too much," said Sara, hopefully. "We won't ask much of him. Just some simple questions."
Tuck held out his hand for the brain case and Sara gave it to him.
"You know how to do?" I asked Tuck.
"I think I do," he said. "There are slots. You just slip it in . . ."
He slipped it in and slapped it with the heel of his hand to drive it home, then banged the skull plate shut.
Roscoe stirred. He had been propped against a wall of earth and now he straightened to stand upon his feet. His head swiveled about to look at each of us in turn. His arms moved tentatively, as if he might be testing them.
He spoke, his voice grating. "Whyever," he said, "wherever, however, forever, whenever."
He stopped speaking and looked around at us as if to see if we had understood him. When it must have been apparent that we hadn't, he said, solemnly and slowly, so there'd be no mistaking him this time, "Hat, cat, bat, fat, rat, sat, vat, pat, gnat, gat, drat, tat."
"He's completely nuts," I said.
"Guts," said Roscoe.
"He rhymes," said Sara. "That is all he does—just a rhyming dictionary. Do you suppose he's forgotten everything? Do you think he knows anything at all?"
I grinned at her. "Why don't you ask him?"
"Roscoe," said Sara, "do you remember anything at all?"
"Tall," said Roscoe, "call, ball, mall, fall, gall."
"No, no," said Sara, "do you remember your master?"
"Pastor," said Roscoe, maddeningly conversational.
"Oh, it's no use!" cried Sara.
"All the way we traveled, all the, trouble we've been through and you down there risking your neck and all we get is this!"
"Roscoe," I said sharply, "we are looking for Lawrence Arlen Knight . . ."
"Kite," said Roscoe, "sight, night, blight . . ."
"No, goddamn it!" I shouted. "We are looking for him. Point in the direction we should look."
"Book," said Roscoe, "cook, took." But even as he mouthed his rhyming gibberish, he squared around and flung out his arm, with a finger pointing, holding his arm and finger rigid, like a steady sign board, pointing northward up the trail.
SEVENTEEN
So we went on, northward, up the trail.
We left the desert and the badlands behind us and climbed steadily for days up a high plateau, while ahead of us the mountains steadily climbed higher in the sky, great, mystic, majestic ramparts that still were touched with the blue of distance.
There was water now, flowing streams of it that ran cold and musically along the pebbled beds. We cached our water tins in one of the stone beehive huts that still sprouted, at intervals, along the trail. Since the badlands none of us carried packs; the packs we had carried were strapped on Roscoe's sturdy back. Feeling a bit sheepish about it, I traveled with the shield slung behind my shoulders and the sword buckled to my waist. It was no kind of fighting equipment for a grown man to carry, but there was in that shield and sword a certain swashbuckling feeling of importance—a throwback to some old ancestor of millennia ago who had taken pride in a warrior's outfit.
We marched, it seemed, with more purpose now. While at times I doubted that Roscoe had known what was going on when he had pointed north (and continued to point north each time we asked him) his seeming confidence gave us at least a feeling of assurance that we no longer were fumbling blindly, but had a track to follow.
The vegetation increased. There was grass and flowering plants, a vast variety of shrubs, and at times groves of stately trees along some of the water courses. And always of course, the sky-scraping trees that towered far into the distance. The air grew chilly and where there had been no wind, there now was wind, blowing with a knife-edge bite. Rodentlike creatures abounded, sitting up and whistling at us as we passed, and occasionally small herds of herbivores. Sara shot one of these and we butchered it and drew straws to see who would be the guinea pig. The long straw fell to me and I ate a few bites of the steak we fried, then sat back to wait. Nothing happened and all of us ate. We had found a food supply and could hoard the little stock we carried.
There was about this high land an ecstatic mysticism and at times I found myself feeling that I was walking through a dream. It was not this high plateau itself, but the total impact of the planet that seemed to come crashing down upon me— the wonder of who had been here before and why they'd left and what might be the purpose of the orchard they had planted and then abandoned, along with the great white city. Huddling close to the campfire, grateful for its warmth against the chill of night, I watched Hoot and wondered at the brotherhood that lay between us, binding us together. He had cleaned my blood of poison and had later asked me for a loan of life and when Tuck had snatched him from me had accepted the loan from Tuck, although I suspected it had been taken as a proxy of my life, for between him and Tuck there was no such thing as brotherhood.
Now, more than ever, Tuck walked by himself, no longer even pretending that he was one of us. He almost never spoke except on those occasions when he mumbled to the doll and once the evening meal was done sat by himself away from the fire, apparently unmindful of the cold. His face became thinner and his body seemed to shrink within the muffling folds of his robe, shrinking not into a skeleton, but into tough rawhide. He took on a gray quality, a shadow sense, so that one became unaware of him. There were times when I'd look around and see him and be surprised to find him there and even wonder, momentarily, who he was, and that strange wiping-out-of-memory was, as well, a part of this high blue land through which we walked. Past and present and the thought and hope of future would seem to blend into a terribly logic feel of time that was in itself eternity, a never-beginning never-ending state of being that hung suspended, in duration and yet had about it a continuing and a sparkling sense of wonder.
So we moved across that great plateau, Paint rocking along in silence except for the occasional click of a rocker against a stone protruding from the trail; Hoot ranging out ahead, a dot against the distance, still working at his scarcely-needed role of scout; Tuck stumbling along like a dim gray ghost muffled to the throat in brown, and Roscoe stumping sturdily, muttering to himself his endless string of rhyming words, never making sense, a vocal moron who trundled happily through an alien never-never land. And I, stalking along with the shield upon my back and the sword banging at my leg, must have appeared as strange as any of the rest. Sara probably was touched the least of all, but she changed as well, regaining the old flare of adventure which had been sheared from her by the toil and monotony and the tension of crossing the desert with its badlands stretches. I saw in her again the woman who had met me in the hallway of that aristocratic house in the midst of its sweeping lawn and who had walked with me, arm in arm, into that room where it all had started.
The mountains loomed higher and lost some of their blueness and we could see now that they were wild and fearsome and breathtaking mountains, with soaring cliffs and mighty canyons, clothed with heavy woods that extended almost to the rocky peaks.
"I have a feeling," Sara said one night as we sat beside the campfire, "that we are nearly there, that we are getting close."
I nodded, for I had the same feeling—that we were getting close, although I could not imagine close to what. Somewhere in those mountains just ahead we would find what we were looking for. I did not think that we would find Lawrence Arlen Knight, for he must long since be dead, but in some strange manner for which I could not account, the conviction had crept into me that we'd find something, that somewhere this trail must end and that at the end of it lay the thing we sought. Although I could not, for the life of me, put into words the sort of thing we sought. I simply did not know. But not knowing did not suppress the excitement and anticipation of what lay just ahead. It was all illogical, of course, an attitude born of the mystic blue through which we journeyed. More than likely the frail would never end, that once it reached the mountains it would continue to go snaking up and around and through that upended country. But logic had no place here. I still continued to believe that the trail would end somewhere just ahead and that at the end of it we'd find something wonderful.
Above us lay the glow of the galaxy—the fierce blue-whiteness of the central core, with the filmy mistiness of the arms spiraling out from it.
"I wonder," Sara said, "if we ever will get back. And if we do get back, what can we tell them, Mike? How is one going to put into words the kind of place this is?"
"A great white city," I said, "and then the desert and after that the highlands and beyond the highlands mountains."
"But that doesn't tell it. That doesn't begin to tell it. The wonder and the mysticism . . ."
"There are never words," I told her, "for the wonder and the glory, never words for fear or happiness."
"I suppose you're right," she said. "But do you suppose we will get back? Have you any idea of how we can get back?"
I shook my head. I had one idea, but it might be a very bad one and there was no use in telling it, there was no use in giving rise to hope that had only a fraction of a chance of ever coming true.
"You know," she said, "I don't really care. It doesn't seem to matter too much. There is something here that I've found nowhere else and I can't tell you what it is. I've thought and thought about it and I still don't know what it is."
"Another day or two," I said, "and we may find what it is."
For I was under the spell as well as she, although perhaps not so completely under it. She may have been more sensitive than I, she may have seen things that I bad missed, or placed different i
nterpretations upon certain impressions that both of us had experienced. There was no way, I realized, that any one person might hope to realize or understand, or even guess, how another person's mind would operate, what impressions it might hold and how those impressions might be formed and how they might be interpreted or what impact the interpretation might have upon the intellect and senses of the owner of the brain.
"Tomorrow, maybe," she said.
And, yes, I thought, tomorrow. It might be tomorrow.
I looked at her across the fire and she had the appearance of a child who was saying, not being sure at all, that tomorrow might be Christmas.
But tomorrow was not trail's end, not Christmas. It turned out to be the day that Tuck disappeared.
We became aware that he was not with us in the middle of the afternoon and, try as we might, we could not recall if he'd been with us at the noonday stop. We were certain that he had started with us in the morning, but that was the only thing of which we could be certain.
We stopped and backtracked. We searched and yelled, but got no response. Finally, as evening fell, we set up camp.
It was ridiculous, of course, that none of us could remember when we had seen him last and I wondered, as I thought of it, whether he had actually left us, wandering off either intentionally or by accident, or if perhaps he had simply faded away, as George may have faded away that night when we were penned by the bombardment of the tree in the red-stone structure at the city's edge. It was the growing grayness of the man, I told myself, that had made it possible for us not to miss him. Day by day he had grown more distant and less approachable, had progressively effaced himself until he moved among us as a ghost would have moved, only half-seen. The growing grayness of the man and the half-sensed enchantment of this blue land through which we made our way, where time ceased to have a great deal of sense of function and one traveled as if he were walking in a dream—these two factors, teamed together, had made his disappearance, I told myself, quite possible.
"There is no point in looking for him anymore," said Sara. "If he had been here, we would have found him. If he had been present, he would have answered us."
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