“If the brother of our brother believes, then let him come. He may speak with Krotag.”
So they rode through the dusk. But Yuntzil did not keep to the main canyon Hosteen had chosen as the straightest route through the foothills. Perhaps a mile beyond the shelter, he turned abruptly to the left, passed behind an outcrop chimney, and brought the Terran into a narrower way. Surra stayed with Hosteen since the Norbie’s mount showed fear of the cat. But Baku was aloft again, and from the eagle Hosteen gained the information that an encampment was not too far ahead.
Silently he thought out his message. To keep the eagle out of sight of any prowling scout, as a set of eyes in reserve, was only a sensible precaution. And he also knew that if and when he gave the order, Surra would melt into the shadows behind them, to be an unseen prowler he would defy any native to locate. She had proved many times in the past that her mutant feline senses were superior to those of any creature, man or animal, that Arzor possessed.
“Now!” As unspoken as his order to Baku, the Terran instructed the dune cat.
The dusk was thick, bringing its coolness after the enervating fire of the day. But ahead was a splotch of light—the camp. Hosteen followed Yuntzil, riding easily. All the horses had been watered before they left the clan shelter, but they quickened their pace, suggesting the necessary liquid was waiting ahead—one of the famous hidden springs, perhaps.
The tall, lean silhouettes of Norbie bodies moved between Hosteen and the fire. He could sight no tent shelters. This might be a scout camp or a hunters’ rendezvous, save that Yuntzil had given his invitation in the name of the chief. The young Norbie dismounted, and now he waited, his hand outstretched for Hosteen’s reins. If he had noted Surra’s disappearance, he did not remark upon it.
Leaving his horses behind him, the Terran walked confidently into the full light of the fire, his sensitive nostrils twitching at the strong, almost unpleasant scent of the burning of bone-dry branches that had been packed from some distance to feed those flames. Falwood, sacred to medicine talks, did not grow in the mountains.
“Hosteen!” A smaller figure separated itself from the tall natives. Like them, he wore the high boots of yoris hide, still attached scales glittering in the greenish light. A wide band of the same hide, this time descaled and softened, made a corselet, covering his body from arm pit to crotch, and over that was the second belt of a warrior from which was suspended the twenty-inch knife of an accepted clansman. Logan had finished off his native dress with the customary yoris-fang collar, which extended from shoulder point to shoulder point and dipped down to belt length across his chest. Above it, his red-brown skin, many shades darker than that of the Norbies, glistened with a sweaty sheen. His head was uncovered, the hair held back from his face by a scarlet band. He was a barbaric figure, somehow more so than the natives about him.
Sighting him free and at ease in the Norbies’ camp. Hosteen felt his anxiety and tension crystallize into irritation. He noted the shade of defiance on his half-brother’s face, guessed that Logan thought the Terran had come to take him home.
Making no answer to Logan, looking beyond him to the waiting warriors, Hosteen held his hands well into the light of the fire and talked with the deliberate, fully rounded gestures of an envoy.
“There is one who is as the Zamle, whose arrows have drunk blood and their points then been powdered into nothingness many times over, who has hunted the yoris in its den and the evil flyer of the heights, alone, with only the strength of his hands and his medicine. I would speak with that one who stands among you wearing in this life the name of Krotag, leader of warriors, guardian of hunters.”
A Norbie moved. The rich beading of his belt glittered more brightly than his scaled leg coverings. His horns, not the ivory-white of the others, were ringed with red.
“There is one named Krotag in this life,” his hands acknowledged. “Here he stands. What is wanted of him?”
“Aid.” Hosteen’s one word answer was, he hoped, enough to intrigue the Norbie’s curiosity.
“What manner of aid, man from the river country? You have entered these hills not at our bidding but of your own will. This is a time when those of our blood are to be busied with hidden things. You were warned that this was so—yet still you have come. And now you ask aid. Again I say, what manner of aid?”
“The manner of aid that those of the clans will understand, for this also is a kind they have rendered many times in the past among themselves and to others. Lost in these hills of yours is a stranger—”
Hosteen saw Logan start, but he paid no attention to that reaction.
“Here stand only those of the Zamle feather—and you. We have heard of no stranger lost. In the Big Dry who goes into the heart of the fire?”
“Well asked.” Hosteen caught that up. “Who goes into the heart of the fire? Many ask that now—naming clans and tribes!”
Krotag’s hands were still. None of the warriors behind him moved. Hosteen wondered if that frankness had been a mistake. But he knew that his motives would be judged by the openness of his speech at this meeting, and totally to ignore the unnatural exodus into the mountains on the part of the clans would be a faulty beginning.
“There are secret things belonging to our people, just as there are secret things that are yours,” Krotag signed.
“That is the truth. A man’s medicine is his own concern. But it is not of medicine I have come here to speak. It is of an off-world stranger who is lost—”
“Again we say—no such stranger has been spoken of.” Krotag’s finger exercises were emphatic.
“Not here, not even in the Peaks—”
“Yet you head into this country. Why, since you say that the man you seek is not here?”
“The Peaks are thus.” Hosteen made a cup of his left hand; the forefinger of his right ran about the outer ridge of that cup in one swift sweep. “Beyond there is other country—”
It was as if he had brought out of hiding some potent “medicine” of his own, medicine embodied with the power of turning Norbies into pillars of stone as rigid as the canyon walls about them.
“This is the story.” The Terran broke into the heart of Widders’ tale, refusing to be daunted by the rigid and now unfriendly regard of the natives. With an economy of gesture he told of the reputed landing of the LB, the possible survival of some of those on board. And as he moved his fingers in the complex patterns demanded by that exposition, Hosteen was aware of a change in his audience, a relaxation of tension. They were absorbed in what he had to say, and they believed him. But whether they were willing to give him passage into the Blue on the strength of this was another matter and one, he thought, that would not be settled speedily. He was right about that, for when he had done, Krotag replied.
“This is something to be thought on, brother of our brother. The fire is yours.” He stepped aside, his men following his example, leaving a clear passage to the strong-smelling smoke and flames.
Hosteen completed the hospitality ritual, walking on, as he held his breath against gusts of nose-tickling smoke, to take his stand within the circle of heat that was pleasant as a symbol but uncomfortable in fact. When he glanced around, the natives had vanished. Only Logan stood there, watching him levelly with suspicion of hostility.
“You’re sharp on the count-off with all this,” he commented.
“If you mean this is a piece of fiction designed to get you back, you’re off orbit course,” Hosteen replied tersely. “It’s all true. Widders’ men are not now planting supply dumps through the Peaks. He’s oath-sure his son is back in the Blue—”