Fiction Complete, page 48
“I should think,” suggested Yorgh, recalling the black hair and flashing eyes, “that one might be found who would wink at letting her keep the power.”
“Well, yes . . . but she could never be sure,” said Ueln. “Of course, if she married a man of another tribe—like you, for instance—it would make no difference. She would still rule, for he would be just a slave, with less rights than even the kitchen flunkies.”
“So?” murmured Yorgh. “Still . . . just let her give me to choose between the kitchen and a house of her young women, and you will see a notable choice made, my friend!”
“Young women reside with their families,” snapped Ueln.
He stared Yorgh up and down, his eyes black pools in the light cast by the flambeaux he carried.
“I admire your attitude,” he sneered with heavy sarcasm. “Enjoy it while you can!”
He strode away down the hall, leaving Yorgh in the dark. The big hunter thought fleetingly of creeping quietly to toe stain, but a saner instinct convinced him that Ueln would not have left them unguarded.
He groped his way to the bed, found that a blanket had been left on the straw, and wrapped himself in it against the night chill of the mountains.
The next three days he spent “enjoying his attitude,” as Ueln had bidden him. The Raydower gave him a tunic of dark Wuc which was only a trifle snug, having belonged to the old chief, and pants of gray Hunter wool. The tunic had a narrow tor collar. Bathed and refreshed, Yorgh regained some of his good nature with the new clothes.
He did not see Vaneen anywhere when he was invited to sit at the great table for meals and to entertain the black-haired Raydower ruler. With unusual insight, he decided that Jayn would probably not be pleased to hear him asking about the girl.
Instead, he told some of his stories, and at supper made Bold to yank a bench from under one of Jayn’s discouraged suitors.
IV
THE roar of laughter died as the fellow scrambled up from the stone floor with a snarl, but Jayn’s husky voice cut across the silence to avert trouble.
She keeps a tight guide-rope, thought Yorgh, and tried to smooth things over by telling one of his stories.
He thought the company about the table seemed impressed at the tale of his latest adventure in the desert, but it might have been the flickering light of the torches.
“I think you must have taken that from an old legend,” said Ueln. “We, too, have half-remembered stories of people who rode out from the shrine in self-moving wagons, in the old days when there were more men in The World.”
“What shrine?” asked Yorgh, for it was a tale he had not heard, although he knew it was widely told of the Raydowers that they held mysterious beliefs.
“On the mountain top,” said Ueln. “You might have seen it any morning when you went with us to swim—”
He stopped abruptly, and Yorgh was aware of a peculiar hush around the table. Then Jayn quickly asked him to describe again how the Hunters made their powerful horn bows famous for their loud twang and swift arrows, and how they got such strength without making them as long as the wooden ones of the mountain people.
Yorgh answered sketchily, not failing to notice Ueln shrug defiantly under the severe stares of several diners near him at the great table.
After the dinner, Jayn called upon some of her girls to sing. Since the procedure had been much the same on previous nights, Yorgh deliberately showed little enthusiasm until he found an opportunity to beg Jayn herself to sing for them.
The Raydower with the neatly curled brown mustache who had paid her this compliment on preceding evenings, as Yorgh had carefully noted, glared and muttered something about “nomad upstarts.” Jayn smiled at Yorgh more warmly than he liked, but he had to admit to himself that she sang well.
The next morning, returning from the small lake in which the men swam, he asked Ueln for permission to walk about the village.
“Jayn didn’t act as if she would mind my seeing something of it,” he jabbed the Raydower.
The latter grunted.
“I heard her whispering to you last night, after the singing, thank you,” he growled. “She can be nice when she likes. Oh, all right! But don’t let one of my riders catch you on the trail to the pass!”
Yorgh grinned and parted from the group to stroll through the narrow paths between the stone houses and their small gardens. After half an hour, by which time the heat of The Star was beginning to lend the alleys the least touch of fragrance, he had the outline of the village well in mind.
He strolled on casually, until he succeeded in coming up behind the shrubbery bordering the space in back of Jayn’s big house. There he loitered for some time, until he saw a trio of kitchen maids carry out wooden buckets of dirty water. One of them wore a soiled and bedraggled blue dress.
Yorgh rustled the bushes hiding him. Vaneen looked sharply about, and he parted the branches an instant.
The girl said something to the other wenches, and they went inside, leaving her to empty the buckets. She carried one pair over toward Yorgh as if to water the shrubbery.
When these were empty, she brought the next pair closer, and stepped around the bush behind which he stood.
“How are you?” asked Yorgh, thinking that she looked like a fish-cleaning woman among the Sea People.
She stared hard at his fine new clothes, and scowled.
“Some people know how to wheedle the best side of the tent for themselves!” she said bitterly. “What did you do to get that pretty tunic from her?”
“Not what you would be jealous to think about,” retorted Yorgh. “Yet,” he added to tease her.
“You look funny in that fur collar,” snapped Vaneen. “Does it have a copper ring under the fur—with a place to fasten on the chain?”
“Ueln gave it to me,” said Yorgh, deriding that it was time to smooth things over. “Listen—it may soon be time to get out of here. Do they lock you in at night?”
“No,” said Vaneen. “They just told me what would happen to me if I went out on the streets at night, so I don’t.”
“Could you sneak out here tonight . . . say about the time Kioto sets?”
Vaneen peered hopefully at his expression, and nodded.
“I have thought of a place to run to,” said Yorgh. “It might work.”
The girl’s brown eyes filled with sudden tears.
“Yorgh, if this is one of your stories—”
“Sssh!” he hushed her, slipping an arm about her shoulders. “You’ve been out too long already. Meet me tonight, here!”
He slipped back into the pathway and hurried off. Vaneen’s tears made him uncomfortable and he tried hard not to feel guilty. She had been having a miserable time, no doubt, but had he any choice but to make himself pleasant to Jayn?
THAT evening he was careful to let himself be seen with Jayn whispering frequently in his ear during the story-telling. She was beginning to hint that he might like to stay in the village for good, but Yorgh’s expressions suggested much more.
Later, after dark, he crept cautiously into the hall with a short length of bed slat tucked in his belt. He had not been allowed a knife except at meals. As he padded to the foot of the stone stairs, a shadow detached itself from the wall near the main door. Yorgh sensed rather than saw the spear that reached out a moment later to prod him just below the ribs.
“Sssh! Quietly!” he whispered. “Jayn expects me.”
The guard grunted, but lowered his spear as if far from surprised. Before he could think the matter over further, Yorgh made a show of enlisting his aid.
“She teased by not saying which is her room,” he claimed, snickering sheepishly. “She is having her joke with me because I said I would be man enough to find it.”
“Such a joke is only the beginning, friend,” the guard assured him. “Up the opposite stairs and to the end of the hall. Come, I will point the way.”
“Slowly,” pleaded Yorgh. “I don’t see as well in the dark as you people.”
He saw clearly enough, however, to note that the man wore only a woolen cap, with no leather to protect his head. Yorgh struck him a chopping blow with the piece of slat.
He caught the spear in one hand, though he almost fumbled it in the dark, and dropped his weapon as quietly as possible to catch the sagging body in his other arm.
I’d better store him out of the way, be thought, heaving the man onto his shoulder.
He crept back up the stairs with his burden, having one nervous moment when he opened the wrong door to the tune of several raucous snores. The sweat itched on his forehead by the time he got the door quietly closed and made sure die next was the one to his own room.
He left the guard comfortably bound, and gagged with a strip of blanket, and traversed the stairway for the third time, wearing a good bronze knife in his belt. Near the door, he groped about until he found the spear and his club. The latter he thrust again into his waistband.
The door made little noise, though it sounded to Yorgh like the bleating of a dozen wollies. Once in the dark street, he padded quickly around the corner of the building, moving with assurance gained from counting the steps in daylight. He left the spear in the grass there, lest it embarrass him later by rattling against something.
A hiss from the bushes halted him in his tracks, until Vaneen whispered his name.
“Good!” Yorgh whispered back, reaching out to touch her arm. “Are you cold? Then, let’s move. Be very quiet till we get out of the village!”
He led the way through some of the narrower alleyways and they sneaked out of the sleeping village by way of someone’s garden. When they had a little distance, Yorgh returned to the trail.
“Where are we going?” asked Vaneen.
“I saw the trail this morning, a little beyond the pond. It must lead to the shrine they talk of, up the mountain. I could see marks on the cliff like steps, when I looked through the trees.”
“Oh! They talked about that shrine in the kitchen when they thought I wasn’t listening,” volunteered the girl. “They said Ueln was wrong to mention it before you.”
“Did they say what it is?”
“No, except that no one ever goes there, and the old stories say the Raydowers were set here to guard it.”
“So no one goes there! Good! That’s what I hoped for.”
Yorgh set off briskly along the path, intent upon not missing the junction with the trail he wanted. Even so, in the dark, he would have gone past, had not a voice spoken out sharply.
“Who’s there?”
Yorgh froze, so promptly that Vaneen bumped into him.
“Ueln,” he answered with the first name that came to him.
Then he saw a darker patch move among the bushes.
Who’d have thought they’d be strict enough to keep a sentry on the trail? he thought.
“You lie!” charged the sentry, overcoming his hesitation. “You are twice Ueln’s size—ah, I know you now, Hunter! Ho—Kansi!”
Yorgh drew his club and hurled it at where he thought the man’s head would be. There was a smack of wood as the other instinctively raised the shaft of his spear before his face.
THEN Yorgh was upon him, bearing him savagely to the ground. One big hand seized the mountain man’s throat. When he grabbed at it with both of his own, Yorgh’s other fist rose and fell like a hammer.
The hunter stood up, listening. Then, stooping swiftly, he groped at the sentry’s belt and handed the man’s knife to Vaneen.
“We must move fast now,” he warned her in an undertone. “I do not like the idea of this ’Kansi’ he called to knowing where we are.”
“I think someone shouted from the village also,” whispered the girl.
“Come, then!” said Yorgh, and plunged into the entrance of the trail to the cliff.
Within a short distance, it became a steep grade. Yorgh prudently slowed to save their legs for the teal climb ahead. A moment later, he congratulated himself for doing this, for they came upon the other sentry leaning on his spear where the bushes opened to form a clearing at the foot of a stone stairway.
“Stay here!” Yorgh breathed with his lips touching Vaneen’s ear. “I’ll try to creep around behind him.”
“I can do better than that,” whispered the girl, pushing against his arm to force him behind a shrub.
Yorgh swore luridly to himself when he discovered that the plant was armed with sharp thorns the size of arrowheads, but it was too late to protest.
“Kansi . . .” called Vaneen softly.
The sentry straightened nervously and hissed, “Who is it?”
“Come and see,” invited the girl, keeping her voice so low that it might have been any girl.
Kansi strode over with quick, worried steps, the picture of a man tom between opportunity and duty.
Yorgh’s big fist shot out of the darkness to take him behind the ear with a solid thunk! He went down without a sound.
Back in the village, there were symptoms of a growing hue and cry. Torches began to move out along the trail.
“Hurry!” said Yorgh.
“What will you do when we reach the top?” asked Vaneen.
“That I will tell you when I see what is there. Perhaps, if we are in possession of their precious shrine, they will think twice before egging us on to destroy it!”
The steps led upward, then doubled back around a narrow turn to rise further. They were on the fourth such flight and still almost directly above the trail when the first Raydowers set up a howl of rage at discovering the unconscious sentries.
“Yorgh!” shouted a voice that sounded like Ueln’s. “Come down! This is no joking matter!”
Yorgh reached back an arm to sweep Vaneen close to the rock out of which the steps were cut, and kept climbing. He guessed that they were more than a hundred feet up.
Then, they turned onto a flight that stretched upward without a landing as far as they had already come, and curled past a comer of the cliff out of sight.
Some bowman below, with the eyes of a night-roaming ponadu, caught sight of the fleeing pair at a place where the stairway narrows to a mere two feet. It seemed to Yorgh that a section of rock must have been broken away by a fall of stone from above, but he put aside his speculation as an arrow hissed up from below and snapped against the face of the cliff less than ten feet ahead.
“They’re coming up the steps too!” Vaneen reported breathlessly.
“Hurry!” urged Yorgh, grabbing her hand. “They seem to think we’re breaking a greater taboo than killing!”
He heard more twanging of bows below, but only two more arrows came dose. Then they were past the narrow spot and protected by the bulge of rock around which the steps curved.
Yorgh groaned when he looked ahead.
“Have they been guarding steps that lead only to a place to jump from?”
Then he saw the dark hole in the rock where the stone footway ended.
“A cave!” gasped Vaneen. “Yorgh, must we go in?”
Little liking the idea himself, he said nothing. His exploring Angers found that the walls, near the entrance at least, were curiously smooth. He edged into the blackness, groping ahead cautiously. Guiding Vaneen’s hand to a grip on his belt, he drew the bronze knife and held it—blade upward and ready—in his right hand.
About thirty feet straight into the mountain, he tripped.
“May die Three Moons sink into the sea!” be growled as he felt about in the dark. “More steps!”
“They’re coming,” said Vaneen.
“I know it,” snapped Yorgh, wondering how patient a man had to be in the face of eating a sheaf of arrows.
Then it occurred to him that it would probably be worse for the girl if they were caught, and he decided that she was being reasonably patient too.
There were three short flights of steps, leading to a short corridor only a few feet wide. This ended in a blank wall, as Yorgh discovered by bumping his head against it.
As his exploring hands reached out on all sides and confirmed that the passage was squared off to a dead end, he growled a particularly obscene oath he had heard among the Sea People. Then he hesitated.
“Vaneen,” he whispered, “can you see anything?”
“Where?” came her whisper over his shoulder. Then he heard her gasp. “Oh, Yorgh, it doesn’t look solid! I can see shadows!”
“It must be some kind of door,” Yorgh declared. “If I only had a Tight! There’s some kind of round bump but I can’t find any handle.”
He threw his weight against the smooth surface but it did not even quiver.
“Well,” said Yorgh, “I was tired of letting that rabble chase me anyway.”
It bothered him, however, not to know what had trapped him, what sort of barrier it was.
I wonder if I could see by sparks from my fire stones? he thought.
He sheathed his knife and thrust a hand into the pouch at his belt His fingers touched something long and metallic.
Of course! he told himself. Although it probably won’t work now that I need it!
He pulled out the metal cylinder and twisted at the ends. As he located the right one, the blue-green light flared oat, brilliant to eyes adjusted to the blackness.
“It is a door!” Vaneen breathed. “Look, Yorgh! You can see through—”
She stopped as the door slowly swung open.
V
YORGH held the light in his left hand and dropped the other to the hilt of his knife, straining to see who or what was opening the door.
Then he decided to thrash that matter out on the inside and twisted the light off to avoid making himself a target.
He stepped forward . . . and smashed into the closing door.
At first, he thought someone had hit him. Then he heard the tiny click as the door shut.
“There are torches below the steps!” Vaneen warned.
Yorgh twisted the light on again, and held it out so he could examine the door closely. He saw the blue-green rays reflected from the small, round bump on the portal, which immediately swung open again.
