Archaelogists and Survey men had picked into the roundabout mountains, tried to learn something more from the valley of ruins beside the garden mountain—to no avail so far. However, one mountain had hidden beauty and delight, so more mountains might contain their own secrets. And the mountains of the Blue were the essence of the unknown. That strange premonition of danger that had awakened in Storm at the sight and sound of the early morning could not be eased. He was somehow very certain his goal was not a fanciful garden this time.
CHAPTER FOUR
Yesterday Hosteen had reached the first of the dumps, strategically located where a crevice gave him and his animals cover during the day. But he was not making the time he had hoped. In this broken country, even with Surra’s keen eyesight and the horses’ instinct to rely upon, he dared not travel too fast at night, and the early morning hours, those of the short dusk, were too few.
But so far, he had had tracks to follow. Trails left by the Norbies crossed and recrossed, made by more than one clan, until in some places he discovered a regular roadway. And he found indications that backed Dort Lancin’s initial report—the natives were pushing onward at a pace that was perilous in this season. One could almost believe they ware being herded on into the hills by some relentless pursuer or pursuers.
There had been no recurrence of the phenomenon in the Peaks, and neither Surra nor Baku had given Storm any more than routine warnings. Yet the vague uneasiness was with Hosteen still as he picked his way along the dried stream bed that bottomed this gorge, his horses strung out with drooping heads.
An alert came from Surra. With a jerk of the lead rein, Hosteen brought the horses against the cliff wall and waited for another message from his furred scout before taking cover himself. Then he heard a trill, rising and falling like the breathy winds of the Wet Time. It was a Norbie signal—and, the Terran hoped. Shosonna. But his stunner was now in his hand to serve if he were wrong.
There—Surra had relaxed. The sentry or scout ahead was not a stranger to her. Hosteen believed that the native had not sighted the dune cat. Her fur was so close in color to the ground that she could be invisible if she wished it so.
Hosteen plodded forward once more, leading his horses, not wanting to ride in the thick heat until he had to. One more hour, maybe less, and he must hole up for the day. But, at a second alert from his feline scout, he swung up on the saddle pad. There was a dignity to be maintained between Norbie and outlander, and mounted man faced mounted native in equality, especially when there might be a point of bargaining ahead.
The Terran called. His voice echoed hollowly back from canyon walls, magnified and distorted until it could have been the united shout of a whole party. One of the wiry black-and-white-coated range horses from a Norbie cavvy came into view, and on it sat Gorgol. The Norbie rider did not advance. His face was expressionless. They might have been strangers meeting trailwise for the first time. Nor did the native’s hands loose the reins preparatory to making finger talk. It was Hosteen who gave the first hand gesture.
“I seek Logan—this is a matter not to be denied.”
Gorgol’s vertical slits of pupils were on him, but he did not acknowledge Hosteen’s message. When his rein hand moved, it was in a swift finger wriggle of rejection and denial.
“Logan is with the clan.” Hosteen stated that as a fact.
“Logan is of the clan,” Gorgol corrected, and so eased Hosteen’s worries by a fraction. If the boy was “of the clan,” his formal adoption was in force and he was not a prisoner.
“Logan is of the clan,” Hosteen agreed. “But he is of the clan of Quade, also. And there is a clan matter he must be concerned with—a task to be done—”
“This is not the season for the herding of frawns or the gathering of horses,” Gorgol countered. “The clan goes to the heights on a matter of medicine—”
“We also have our medicine, and no man denies his clan call. I must have speech with Logan on this matter. Would I have ridden into these hills in the Big Dry, I who cannot whistle up the water, were it not a matter of medicine?”
Gorgol was plainly impressed by the sense of that, but when Hosteen would have ridden on, he urged his own mount crosswise to bar the path.
“This is clan talk. Krotag will decide. Until then—you wait.”
There was no use in pushing further. Hosteen looked about him. The wait might last an hour—or a day. If he had to stay, he needed protection for the time when the sun would pour down, turning earth and rock into a baking oven. And Gorgol must have read his need, for now the Norbie pulled his mount around.
“Come,” he signed. “There is a wait place ahead. But there you must stay.”
“There I will stay,” Hosteen agreed.
Gorgol’s wait place surprised Hosteen. It was a camp site improved by the Norbies, a semipermanent structure of sorts compared to their usual skin-tent villages. Rocks and storm drift, carried along the canyon floor in the Wet Time floods, had been cobbled into an erection large enough to shelter most of a clan, the walls rising above the pit, which gave the coolness of the inner earth to those sweating out the furnace hot hours of the day. Hosteen found more than enough room for his horses, and soon Surra slipped in and Baku swooped down to pick a temporary perch. Hosteen shared out the water and provisions he had renewed at the dump. If he held to the trail marked for him, he would be able to stock up again in two days. But dealing with the clans might throw off his schedule.
He lay on his back on the cool earth and went over their nebulous plans for the hundredth time. Not only would the ’copter lay down dumps ahead, but it should be waiting at their last rendezvous this side of the Peaks to be used in primary exploration for a way through the mountain barrier—providing the Norbies could not or would not guide an off-world party into the Blue.
After a while he must have slept, for he aroused with a start. Surra was pawing at his arm, giving the old signal from their days in the field. She was alerting, not warning, and he expected Gorgol. But the Norbie who dropped down into the shelter was a youngster not yet wearing a hunter’s trophy.
“Yuntzil!” Hosteen turned up both thumbs in the warrior’s greeting. Gorgol’s younger brother was manifestly pleased by this gesture from one wearing warrior’s scars, even though of an alien race.
“I see you, one with honorable scars,” the boy’s slim fingers flashed in the last light of dusk. “I come bearing the signs of Krotag. The Feathered One says: ’There is a time of medicine in the hills, and the fires of friendship burn low. If the brother of our brother rides here, he does so knowing that medicine is a chancy thing and may rend the unbeliever, even as it holds the bow of defense before the believer—”
A warning, but not an outright refusal to allow him to proceed. Hosteen had that much. He stretched his hands into the funnel of light from the doorway so that Yuntzil would have no difficulty in reading the signs he made slowly and with care.
“This one is no unbeliever. To each man his own medicine and the wisdom not to belittle the belief of another. I do not ride under Krotag’s medicine, but I have my own.” He had taken the precaution that morning before his meeting with Gorgol to put on the heavy turquoise and silver necklace that was part of his inheritance from the past. On their first quest together, when they had faced the Xiks, he had worn that as well as the ketoh bracelet, and he knew that the Norbies now considered both ancient ornaments as talismans of power.