Andre Norton: The Essential Collection Page 49

  The Apaches' bows were little use for infighting, but they had their knives. However, Travis wanted to take the fugitive unharmed if he could. There was information he must have. So he did not even draw his knife as he started downhill.

  When he reached a pool of violet dusk at the bottom of the small ravine Naginlta's eyes regarded him knowingly. Travis signaled with his hand and thought out what would be the coyotes' part in this surprise attack. The prick-eared silhouette vanished. Uphill the chitter of a fluff-fur sounded twice—Tsoay was in position.

  A howl ... wailing ... sobbing ... was heard, one of the keening songs of the mba'a. Travis darted forward. He heard the nicker of a frightened horse, a clicking which could have marked the pawing of hoof on gravel, saw the brush hiding the stranger's hole tremble, a portion of it fall away.

  Travis sped on, his moccasins making no sound on the ground. One of the coyotes gave tongue for the second time, the eerie wailing rising to a yapping which echoed from the rocks about them. Travis poised for a dive.

  Another section of those artfully heaped branches had given way and a horse reared, its upflung head plainly marked against the sky. A blurred figure weaved back and forth before it, trying to control the mount. The stranger had his hands full, certainly no weapon drawn—this was it!

  Travis leaped. His hands found their mark, the shoulders of the stranger. There was a shrill cry from the other as he tried to turn in the Apache's hold, to face his attacker. But Travis bore them both on, rolling almost under the feet of the horse, sliding downhill, the unknown's writhing body pinned down by the Apache's weight and his clasp, tight as an iron grip, about the other's chest and upper arms.

  He felt his opponent go limp, but was suspicious enough not to release that hold, for the heavy breathing of the stranger was not that of an unconscious man. They lay so, the unknown still tight in Travis' hold but no longer fighting. The Apache could hear Tsoay soothing the horse with the purring words of a practiced horseman.

  Still the stranger did not resume the struggle. They could not lie in this position all night, Travis thought with a wry twist of amusement. He shifted his hold, and got the lightning-quick response he had expected. But it was not quite quick enough, for Travis had the other's hands behind his back, cupping slender, almost delicate wrists together.

  "Throw me a cord!" he called to Tsoay.

  The younger man ran up with an extra bow cord, and in a moment they had bonds on the struggling captive. Travis rolled their catch over, reaching down for a fistful of hair to pull the head into a patch of clearer light.

  In his grasp that hair came loose, a braid unwinding. He grunted as he looked down into the stranger's face. Dust marks were streaked now with tear runnels, but the gray eyes which turned fiercely on him said that their owner cried more in rage than fear.

  His captive might be wearing long trousers tucked into curved, toed boots, and a loose overblouse, but she was certainly not only a woman, but a very young and attractive one. Also, at the present moment, an exceedingly angry one. And behind that anger was fear, the fear of one fighting hopelessly against insurmountable odds. But as she eyed Travis now her expression changed.

  He felt she had expected another captor altogether and was astounded at the sight of him. Her tongue touched her lips, moistening them, and now the fear in her was another kind—the wary fear of one facing a totally new and perhaps dangerous thing.

  "Who are you?" Travis spoke in English, for he had no doubts that she was Terran.

  Now she sucked in her breath with a gasp of pure astonishment.

  "Who are you?" she parroted his question in a marked accent. English was not her native tongue, he was sure.

  Travis reached out, and again his hands closed on her shoulders. She started to twist and then realized he was merely pulling her up to a sitting position. Some of the fear had left her eyes, an intent interest taking its place.

  "You are not Sons of the Blue Wolf," she stated in her heavily accented speech.

  Travis smiled. "I am the Fox, not the Wolf," he returned. "And the Coyote is my brother." He snapped his fingers at the shadows, and the two animals came noiselessly into sight. Her gaze widened even more at Naginlta and Nalik'ideyu, and she deduced the bond which must exist between her captor and the beasts.

  "This woman is also of our world." Tsoay spoke in Apache, looking over their prisoner with frank interest. "Only she is not of the People."

  Sons of the Blue Wolf? Travis thought again of the embroidery designs on the jacket. Who had called themselves by that picturesque title—where—and when in time?

  "What do you fear, Daughter of the Blue Wolf?" he asked.

  And with that question he seemed to touch some button activating terror. She flung back her head so that she could see the darkening sky.

  "The flyer!" Her voice was muted as if more than a whisper would carry to the stars just coming into brilliance above them. "They will come ... tracking. I did not reach the inner mountains in time."

  There was a despairing note in that which cut through to Travis, who found that he, too, was searching the sky, not knowing what he looked for or what kind of menace it promised, only that it was real danger.

  6

  "The night comes," Tsoay spoke slowly in English. "Do these you fear hunt in the dark?"

  She shook her head to free her forehead from a coil of braid, pulled loose in her struggle with Travis.

  "They do not need eyes or such noses as those four-footed hunters of yours. They have a machine to track—"

  "Then what purpose is this brush pile of yours?" Travis raised his chin at the disturbed hiding place.

  "They do not constantly use the machine, and one can hope. But at night they can ride on its beam. We are not far enough into the hills to lose them. Bahatur went lame, and so I was slowed...."

  "And what lies in these mountains that those you fear dare not invade them?" Travis continued.

  "I do not know, save if one can climb far enough inside, one is safe from pursuit."

  "I ask it again: Who are you?" The Apache leaned forward, his face in the fast-fading light now only inches away from hers. She did not shrink from his close scrutiny but met him eye to eye. This was a woman of proud independence, truly a chief's daughter, Travis decided.

  "I am of the People of the Blue Wolf. We were brought across the star lanes to make this world safe for ... for ... the...." She hesitated, and now there was a shade of puzzlement on her face. "There is a reason—a dream. No, there is the dream and there is reality. I am Kaydessa of the Golden Horde, but sometimes I remember other things—like this speech of strange words I am mouthing now——"

  "The Golden Horde!" Travis knew now. The embroidery, Sons of the Blue Wolf, all fitted into a special pattern. But what a pattern! Scythian art, the ornament that the warriors of Genghis Khan bore so proudly. Tatars, Mongols—the barbarians who had swept from the fastness of the steppes to change the course of history, not only in Asia but across the plains of middle Europe. The men of the Emperor Khans who had ridden behind the yak-tailed standards of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, Tamerlane—!

  "The Golden Horde," Travis repeated once again. "That lies far back in the history of another world, Wolf Daughter."

  She stared at him, a queer, lost expression on her dust-grimed face.

  "I know." Her voice was so muted he could hardly distinguish the words. "My people live in two times, and many do not realize that."

  Tsoay had crouched down beside them to listen. Now he put out his hand, touching Travis' shoulder.

  "Redax?"

  "Or its like." For Travis was sure of one point. The project, which had been training three teams for space colonization—one of Eskimos, one of Pacific Islanders, and one of his own Apaches—had no reason or chance to select Mongols from the wild past of the raiding Hordes. There was only one nation on Terra which could have picked such colonists.

  "You are Russian." He studied her carefully, intent on noting the effect
of his words.

  But she did not lose that lost look. "Russian ... Russian ..." she repeated, as if the very word was strange.

  Travis was alarmed. Any Russian colony planted here could well possess technicians with machines capable of tracking a fugitive, and if mountain heights were protection against such a hunt, he intended to gain them, even by night traveling. He said this to Tsoay, and the other emphatically agreed.

  "The horse is too lame to go on," the younger man reported.

  Travis hesitated for a long second. Since the time they had stolen their first mounts from the encroaching Spanish, horses had always been wealth to his people. To leave an animal which could well serve the clan was not right. But they dared not waste time with a lame beast.

  "Leave it here, free," he ordered.

  "And the woman?"

  "She goes with us. We must learn all we can of these people and what they do here. Listen, Wolf Daughter," again Travis leaned close to make sure she was listening to him as he spoke with emphasis—"you will travel with us into these high places, and there will be no trouble from you." He drew his knife and held the blade warningly before her eyes.

  "It was already in my mind to go to the mountains," she told him evenly. "Untie my hands, brave warrior, you have surely nothing to fear from a woman."

  His hand made a swift sweep and plucked a knife as long and keen as his from the folds of the sash beneath her loose outer garment.

  "Not now, Wolf Daughter, since I have drawn your fangs."

  He helped her to her feet and slashed the cord about her wrists with her knife, which he then fastened to his own belt. Alerting the coyotes, he dispatched them ahead; and the three started on, the Mongol girl between the two Apaches. The abandoned horse nickered lonesomely and then began to graze on tufts of grass, moving slowly to favor his foot.

  The two moons rode the sky as the hours advanced, their beams fighting the shadows. Travis felt reasonably safe from any attack at ground level, depending upon the coyotes for warning. But he held them all to a steady pace. And he did not question the girl again until all three of them hunkered down at a small mountain spring, to dash icy water over their faces and drink from cupped hands.

  "Why do you flee your own people, Wolf Daughter?"

  "My name is Kaydessa," she corrected him.

  He chuckled with laughter at the prim tone of her voice. "And you see here Tsoay of the People—the Apaches—while I am Fox." He was giving her the English equivalent of his tribal name.

  "Apaches." She tried to repeat the word with the same accent he had used. "And what are Apaches?"

  "Indians—Amerindians," he explained. "But you have not answered my question, Kaydessa. Why do you run from your own people?"

  "Not from my people," she said, shaking her head determinedly. "From those others. It is like this—Oh, how can I make you understand rightly?" She spread her wet hands out before her in the moonlight, the damp patches on her sleeves clinging to her arms. "There are my people of the Golden Horde, though once we were different and we can remember bits of that previous life. Then there are also the men who live in the sky ship and use the machine so that we think only the thoughts they would have us think. Now why," she looked at Travis intently—"do I wish to tell you all this? It is strange. You say you are Indian—American—are we then enemies? There is a part memory which says that we are ... were...."

  "Let us rather say," he corrected her, "that the Apaches and the Horde are not enemies here and now, no matter what was before." That was the truth, Travis recognized. By all accounts his people had come out of Asia in the very dim beginnings of migrating peoples. For all her dark-red hair and gray eyes, this girl who had been arbitrarily returned to a past just as they had been by Redax, could well be a distant clan-cousin.

  "You—" Kaydessa's fingers rested for a moment on his wrist—"you, too, were sent here from across the stars. Is this not so?"

  "It is so."

  "And there are those here who govern you now?"

  "No. We are free."

  "How did you become free?" she demanded fiercely.

  Travis hesitated. He did not want to tell of the wrecked ship, the fact that his people possessed no real defenses against the Russian-controlled colony.

  "We went to the mountains," he replied evasively.

  "Your governing machine failed?" Kaydessa laughed. "Ah, they are so great, those men of the machines. But they are smaller and weaker when their machines cannot obey them."

  "It is so with your camp?" Travis probed gently. He was not quite sure of her meaning, but he dared not ask more detailed questions without dangerously revealing his own ignorance.

  "In some manner their control machine—it can only work upon those within a certain distance. They discovered that in the days of the first landing, when hunters went out freely and many of them did not return. After that when hunters were sent out to learn how lay this land, they went along in the flyer with a machine so that there would be no more escapes. But we knew!" Kaydessa's fingers curled into small fists. "Yes, we knew that if we could get beyond the machines, there was freedom for us. And we planned—many of us—planned. Then nine or ten sleeps ago those others were very excited. They gathered in their ship, watching their machines. And something happened. For a while all those machines went dead.

  "Jagatai, Kuchar, my brother Hulagur, Menlik...." She was counting the names off on her fingers. "They raided the horse herd, rode out...."

  "And you?"

  "I, too, should have ridden. But there was Aljar, my sister—Kuchar's wife. She was very near her time and to ride thus, fleeing and fast, might kill her and the child. So I did not go. Her son was born that night, but the others had the machine at work once more. We might long to go here," she brought her fist up to her breast, and then raised it to her head—"but there was that here which kept us to the camp and their will. We only knew that if we could reach the mountains, we might find our people who had already gained their freedom."

  "But you are here. How did you escape?" Tsoay wanted to know.

  "They knew that I would have gone had it not been for Aljar. So they said they would make her ride out with them unless I played guide to lead them to my brother and the others. Then I knew I must take up the sword of duty and hunt with them. But I prayed that the spirits of the upper air look with favor upon me, and they granted aid...." Her eyes held a look of wonder. "For when we were out on the plains and well away from the settlement, a grass devil attacked the leader of the searching party, and he dropped the mind control and so it was broken. Then I rode. Blue Sky Above knows how I rode. And those others are not with their horses as are the people of the Wolf."

  "When did this happen?"

  "Three suns ago."

  Travis counted back in his mind. Her date for the failure of the machine in the Russian camp seemed to coincide with the crash landing of the American ship. Had one thing any connection with the other? It was very possible. The planeting spacer might have fought some kind of weird duel with the other colony before it plunged to earth on the other side of the mountain range.

  "Do you know where in these mountains your people hide?"

  Kaydessa shook her head. "Only that I must head south, and when I reach the highest peak make a signal fire on the north slope. But that I cannot do now, for those in the flyer may see it. I know they are on my trail, for twice I have seen it. Listen, Fox, I ask this of you—I, Kaydessa, who am eldest daughter to the Khan—for you are like unto us, a warrior and a brave man, that I believe. It may be that you cannot be governed by their machine, for you have not rested under their spell, nor are of our blood. Therefore, if they come close enough to send forth the call, the call I must obey as if I were a slave dragged upon a horse rope, then do you bind my hands and feet and hold me here, no matter how much I struggle to follow that command. For that which is truly me does not want to go. Will you swear this by the fires which expel demons?"

  The utter sincerity of her tone co
nvinced Travis that she was pleading for aid against a danger she firmly believed in. Whether she was right about his immunity to the Russian mental control was another matter, and one he would rather not put to the test.

  "We do not swear by your fires, Blue Wolf Maiden, but by the Path of the Lightning." His fingers moved as if to curl about the sacred charred wood his people had once carried as "medicine." "So do I promise!"

  She looked at him for a long moment and then nodded in satisfaction.

  They left the pool and pushed on toward the mountain slopes, working their way back to the pass. A low growl out of the dark brought them to an instant halt. Naginlta's warning was sharp; there was danger ahead, acute danger.

  The moonlight from the moons made a weird pattern of light and dark on the stretch ahead. Anything from a slinking four-footed hunter to a war party of intelligent beings might have been lying in wait there.

  A flitting shadow out of shadows. Nalik'ideyu pressed against Travis' legs, making a barrier of her warm body, attracting his attention to a spot at the left perhaps a hundred yards on. There was a great splotch of dark there, large enough to hide a really formidable opponent; that wordless communication between animal and man told Travis that such an opponent was just what was lurking there.

  Whatever lay in ambush beside the upper track was growing impatient as its destined prey ceased to advance, the coyotes reported.

  "Your left—beyond that pointed rock—in the big shadow—"

  "Do you see it?" Tsoay demanded.

  "No. But the mba'a do."

  The men had their bows ready, arrows set to the cords. But in this light such weapons were practically useless unless the enemy moved into the path of the moon.

  "What is it?" Kaydessa asked in a half whisper.

  "Something waits for us ahead."