“The Sealed Caves—” Hosteen repeated aloud.
“But this is in the open, not in a cave!” Logan’s thoughts matched with his. “How could they control the open?”
“How did they fashion that cavern?” Hosteen asked. “But if there are more remains of that civilization here, it could explain a lot.”
“The ‘medicine,’ you mean?”
“Yes, and maybe those tricky air currents that have defeated Survey exploration in here.”
“But the Norbies have always avoided the Sealed Caves.”
“In the outer Peaks they have, but here we can’t be sure the same taboo holds. We can’t even be sure that somewhere on Arzor, it might be right here, the Old Ones themselves don’t exist still. Don’t the legends say that they retired to some of the caves and sealed the openings behind them—eventually to issue forth again in the future?”
Hosteen did not quite believe that, though. That some wild Norbies were exploiting Sealed Cave knowledge—that was possible. That the mysterious and long-gone forerace among the stars could linger on here directing the activities of a primitive tribe or tribes—no, somehow that did not fit. The men, or creatures, who had designed and created the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens could have nothing in common with warriors who kept skulls and right hands of their defeated enemies to adorn their temples. There was a contradiction in mental processes there.
Again Logan’s thoughts followed the same path. “I’d rather believe the Norbies were heirs,” he said slowly.
“Unworthy ones, I think. Maybe the answer lies on that mountain.”
“We’ll probably never get a chance to learn it,” Logan’s reply was bleak. “I think we were cut out of the herd to supply some spectacular touches to a big Drum Feast.”
Hosteen had long ago reached the same conclusion. And his struggles against his bonds had proved to him the folly of trying to beat the Norbie system of confining prisoners. One could only fall back on the rather grim thought that as long as one was still alive, there was a small measure of hope.
“Listen!” Logan’s head bobbed up as he tried vainly to raise himself a few inches from the floor.
Drums were sounding, more than one now, with a pause between each roll. Hosteen, listening intently, thought he could distinguish a slightly different note in each one of those short bursts.
Norbies had been in and out of the Thunder House all morning, but now a large party entered from the south. Then came a thin, wiry native, his black horns tipped with red, a shoulder plate necklace, not of yoris teeth but of small and well polished bones, covering most of his chest. He took the Chief’s stool.
Hosteen’s view of the scene was from floor level, but he sighted the second party entering from the west, a peace pole held up ostentatiously. Drummer and Chief walked behind that. When a second and then a third such delegation arrived through the western door, Hosteen realized this was not a gathering of a clan but a meeting of tribal representatives, and from tribes once enemies.
Five, six such delegations now, a handful of warriors ranked behind each chief and medicine man. The seventh—Hosteen started—Krotag and Ukurti led that.
The Drummer of the village was at the north stool. Now he beat a thunderous roll on his knee drum, and two youths broke from the villagers’ group, brought out between them a block of wood, square, polished with the sheen of years’, perhaps of centuries, handling. Planting this before the fire pit to the north, they laid upon it a leafy branch of the sacred fal tree, then scuttled back to the anonymity of the shadows behind their Drummer.
“Speeches now,” Logan half whispered in a lull of drumming.
Speeches there were, and Hosteen longed for the power to translate that whistling-twittering. In turn, the village Drummer and the Chief arose, walked to the block, struck it across the top with the fal branch, and launched into a burst of oratory, from time to time striking the block again with the fal wand to emphasize some point. Then each of the visiting chiefs and drummers followed their example.
Hosteen’s head ached, his mouth was parched and dry, and he lay gasping, hardly conscious of the continuing drone at the center of the Thunder House. He wanted water and food—but more than anything, water. Twice he tried to reach Baku, Surra—to no avail. The cat and the eagle might have escaped out of the valley, and he began to hope that they had.
Any chance he and Logan might have had now diminished to the vanishing point. He had thought of Krotag and the Shosonna as possible allies. But Krotag had been the second one to make a speech. Whatever tied the Norbies together in this peace pact was strong enough to withstand any leanings toward friendship with settlers that the plains natives might have once had.
How long that conference lasted neither Hosteen nor Logan could have told. The former was afterwards sure he had lapsed into semiconsciousness from fatigue, lack of water, and the smoky fumes of the fal twigs the Norbies kept feeding into the fire. When a sharp prod in the ribs roused him into full wakefulness, all traces of sunlight were gone and the gloom of night was cut again by blue torches.
One of the same youths who had dragged out the speech block leaned over him and thrust a tube through the mesh of the net and between the Terran’s lips. He sucked avidly, and liquid filled his mouth. If it was water, some other substance had been added, for it tasted sweet and yet sharp, like an off-world relish, and Hosteen sucked and swallowed greedily, his thirst vanishing, his mental torpor fading as he did so. Then the tube was jerked roughly from his lips, and he licked them for the last lingering drop, feeling energy creep back into his body. Logan was similarly fed and watered. Beyond the captives stood both the village Chief and the Drummer, watching the process with an air of impatience, as if eager to push on to some more important task.
A ripple of fingers on drum head brought in a guard of warriors, tough, seasoned fighting men, Hosteen judged from their attitude and the bone necklets they wore. Once more the ropes holding the nets were loosed, and the prisoners, still helpless in their lashings, were rolled like bales into the full torchlight.
Another warrior came out of the shadows, bearing across his shoulder the loops of their arms belts, their canteens. It would seem that where they were going their equipment was to accompany them. And for the first time, Hosteen remembered Logan’s grisly description of what he had seen about the grounded LB—sacrifices. Were they about to join the horse, to do honor to whatever power these Norbies imagined the star ship escape craft represented or held?
They had been carried into the village, but they were to walk out. Nets were whirled off their stiff bodies, a loop rope dragged tight about their chests and upper arms. Hosteen stumbled along for a step or two, trying to make his cramped limbs obey. Then two of his captors caught him by the shoulder on either side as supports and herders.
For the first time he saw the females of the village well behind the lines of warriors. Yes, some ceremony was in prospect, one intended for all the tribesmen and their visitors—for under each peace pole, which they had seen in the Thunder House earlier and which now were planted here in the open, was a grouping of strangers.
The two men were half led, half dragged along a well-worn trail leading from the village toward the dark bulk of the mountainside down which the fire had hunted them into their captors’ nets. Behind, as Hosteen saw when he glanced back once, trying to pick out Krotag’s group, the villagers and their guests fell in to form a straggling procession, carrying torches.