Empire of the East Page 5

  Rolf looked gloomily at his sword, unstained in this latest skirmish. “Mewick—teach me to use weapons?”

  “…in self-defense,” Mewick muttered, sitting up. He seemed to have thrown himself into the bottom of the canoe to escape the sword’s last swipe.

  “Oh! I’m sorry.” Rolf’s ears burned. He took up his paddle and applied himself to its use, looking straight ahead.

  After a while Mewick’s voice behind him said, “Yes, all right, then I will teach you, when I can. Since the sword is in your hand already.”

  Rolf looked back. “And other kinds of fighting, too? The way you kicked that Castle-man yesterday…”

  “Yes, yes, when there is time.” Mewick’s voice held no enthusiasm. “These are not things to be learned in a week or a month.”

  The channel they had been following divided, came together, and then branched again. Manka, now choosing their way from her position in the stern, seldom hesitated over which branch to take. Loford’s magic continued to be of help; it opened walls of interlaced vines ahead of the canoe—or at least made them easier to open by hand—and then knitted them once more into a barrier after the craft had passed. Rolf paddled in the direction he was bidden, meanwhile keeping a sharp lookout ahead.

  Looking ahead, Rolf was the first to see the young girl gazing down at them from a lookout’s perch in a high tree; he rested his paddle and was about to speak when Manka said, “It’s all right. She’s a sentry of the big camp.”

  The brown-haired girl in the tree, dressed like Manka in male clothing, also recognized the Big One and his wife. She came sliding down from her observation post and ran along the bank to greet them. To Rolf and Mewick she was introduced as Sarah; Rolf guessed she was about fourteen years old.

  And she was obviously anxious about something. “I don’t suppose any of you have any word of Nils?” she asked, looking from one person to another.

  Nils was Sarah’s boy friend, seemingly about Rolf’s age or a little older. He had gone out on some kind of raid or scouting expedition with the other young men of the Free Folk, and they were overdue. No one in the canoe was able to give Sarah any information, but they all tried to reassure her, and she waved after them cheerfully enough when they paddled on.

  Very soon after passing the sentry-post, they came to an island much larger than the one they had fled earlier in the day. A dozen canoes were already beached at a muddy landing-place, from which well-worn trails branched into the woods. Along one of these paths six or eight people came filing to greet the newcomers as they landed.

  By now the afternoon was far advanced. Here in the deep shade of the island’s trees the bird, Strijeef, began to come out of his lethargy. He raised his head and said a few words in his musical voice, then flew soundlessly up into a stout tree where he settled himself again. This time he did not hide his head but peered out slit-eyed from among puffed feathers. A few words of the bird’s speech seemed to have been directed at Rolf, but he had been unable to understand.

  “The bird bids you thanks, for fighting off reptiles,” said a tall young man, taking note of Rolf’s perplexity.

  “He is quite welcome,” said Rolf. Then in a bitter tone he added, “I had the chance to kill some of them and I failed.”

  The man shrugged and said something encouraging. Introducing himself as Thomas, he began to question Rolf about the events of the last two days. Thomas was perhaps ten years Rolf’s senior, strongly built and serious of manner. He had greeted the other new arrivals as old friends, and had questioned them at once about the movements of the enemy.

  While Rolf was giving Thomas and the others a description of his missing sister, the group walked from the landing-place to what was evidently the main camp, where a dozen large shelters had been built under concealing trees. Rolf’s story was received with sympathy, but no surprise; most of his hearers could have matched it with something from their own lives. The description of Lisa would be circulated, but Thomas warned Rolf there was little reason to be hopeful.

  The evening meal of the camp was just ready; there was no shortage of fish and succulent stew. A company that grew gradually to fifteen or twenty people was gathering about the cooking fire.

  The food drew most of Rolf’s attention, but he heard the word being passed in from a lookout that another canoe was coming. It bore only a lone messenger, who was soon being entertained at fire-side. He brought some apparently routine news, and after he had spoken in conference with Loford, Thomas, and several others, another messenger was dispatched. Obviously this camp was some center of command, in contact with other groups of Free Folk. But while the message brought by the man in the canoe was being discussed, Rolf sensed something strained in the decision-making process here. Many people seemed to be taking part in it, not all of them quite willingly. They spoke with slow hesitance, each weighing his neighbors’ reactions as he went on from word to word. No one seemed eager to push himself or his ideas forward.

  “If only the Old One were here!” one man lamented, seemingly exasperated by the length of a debate which had sprung up, over whether or not a certain cache of weapons should be moved.

  “Well, he’s not,” a woman answered. “And he’s not coming back.”

  “He was Ardneh, if you ask me,” said the first speaker. “And now no one is.”

  Rolf had not heard of Ardneh before. And so a little later, when Loford sat down beside him to eat, he asked the wizard what the man had meant.

  Loford answered casually at first. “Oh, we’ve come to use the name as a symbol for our cause. For our hopes of freedom. We seem to be trying to build ourselves a god.”

  A what? Rolf wondered silently.

  Chewing slowly on a morsel of fish, Loford squinted into the firelight, which seemed now to brighten rapidly with the fading of the day. Now he spoke more intently.

  “In a vision I myself have beheld Ardneh in this guise: the figure of a warrior, armed with the thunderbolt, mounted on the Elephant.”

  Rolf was much impressed. “But Ardneh is real, then? A living being, some kind of demon or elemental?”

  The movement of Loford’s massive shoulders might have meant that the question had no answer. “He was a god of the Old World, or so we think.”

  Curiosity left Rolf no choice but to reveal the depth of his ignorance. “What is a god?”

  “Oh,” said Loford, “we have no gods, these days.” He interested himself more in his food.

  “But were gods like demons?” Rolf asked helplessly, when it seemed that no more information was forthcoming. Once he started trying to find out about something he hated to quit.

  “They were more than that; but I am only a country wizard and I know little.” In the Big One’s voice there sounded a momentary weight of sadness.

  And then Rolf forgot about probing such deep matters, for Sarah came to join the group about the fire, having just been relieved of sentry duty. Rolf talked with her while she ate her evening meal. Her boys’ clothes could not disguise the prettiness of her face nor the shapeliness of her tiny body, and he felt disinclined to seek out any other company.

  She talked with him easily enough, heard his story with sympathy, listened carefully to a description of his sister—then she related almost casually how her family too had been destroyed by the men and creatures of the Castle.

  Her mask of calm lifted when another messenger was reported arriving by dugout, and when this man came to the fire she listened with a bright spark of interest—which soon faded. The news had nothing to do with Nils.

  The sun had now been down for some time, and Sarah grew steadily more attractive in the warm glow of firelight. But Rolf’s meditations on this subject were interrupted by the arrival of yet another messenger.

  This one came by air. Strijeef, who had awakened rapidly and begun to move about as the last light faded from the sky, was the first to see the approaching bird. But Strijeef had only just gotten into the air and uttered his first greeting hoot before the new
arrival was down, stooping with startling speed through the leafy roof above the fires, then on the ground, shivering and gasping rapidly in what seemed near-exhaustion. People gathered around it quickly, shading its eyes from the firelight, offering it water and demanding to hear the news that inspired such effort.

  The first words this bird uttered came out well mixed with gasping hoots and whistles, but they were loud and plain enough to be understood by even Rolf’s unpracticed ears: “I have—found the Elephant.”

  The bird was a young female, whose name Rolf understood as Feathertip. Early last evening she had been prowling near the Castle. That place and its high reptile roosts were defended, by stretched cords and nets, from any bird’s attack, but there was always the chance just after sunset of intercepting some reptile tardily hurrying home.

  Last night there had been several stragglers, but Feathertip had been disappointed in her attempt to catch them; it had simply taken her too long to get near the Castle from her daytime hiding place in the forest. The latest of the leatherwings had got himself home safe in the darkness just ahead of her.

  So it had occurred to her to try to find a place very near the Castle in which to hide during the daylight hours. With this in mind she had flown along the northern side of the pass upon whose southern edge the Castle perched. The pass interrupted the thin line of the Broken Mountains. On the northern side of the break the mountain ended in a jumble of crevices and narrow canyons which promised some concealment. In the moonlight, Feathertip flew there searching for some ledge or cranny so well hidden that the reptiles would not be likely to see it during their daylight patrols, so high and inaccessible that no patrol of soldiers would be able to get near.

  The great birds’ eyes were at their best by moonglow and in the tricky shadows of the night. Still Feathertip had twice passed by the opening before she paused, on her third flight through a narrow canyon, to investigate what seemed no more than a dark spot on a sheltered face of rock.

  The spot turned out to be a hole, the entrance of a cave. An opening not only concealed from any but the most careful of winged searches, but so narrow that Feathertip thought that if worst came to worst, she might even be able to defend it in the light. And so she determined to stay.

  Seeking out the inner recesses of the cave, to find what other entrances there might be and also to escape as far as possible the pressure of the morning sun, the bird had made her great discovery. Through a narrow descending shaft—down which one of the heavy wingless people should be able to climb if he took care—Feathertip had reached a cave as smooth as the inside of an egg, and long and wide enough to hold a house. The bird knew the sign of the Elephant, and this sign was on each flank of the enormous—creature?—thing? (Feathertip could not decide which word applied) which alone occupied the cave, and which in her opinion could hardly be anything but the Elephant itself.

  Four-legged? No, it had seemed to have no legs at all. Had it a grasping nose, and teeth like swords? No—at least not quite. But never had the bird seen anything like that which waited unmoving in the buried cave.

  By now Feathertip had regained her breath, and was plainly enjoying her telling of a story that made the heavy wingless people crowd around to question her so impatiently. She was established now with her back to a shaded fire, and for the most part the humans saw her as a dark soft outline, having huge eyes that now and then sparked faintly with the caught reflection of something luminescing out in the swamp.

  She stuck stubbornly to her conviction that the thing in the cave could be nothing less than the Elephant itself. No, it had not moved; but it did not seem dead or ruined. On what seemed to be its head it did have several projections, all of them looking stiff as claws. No, Feathertip had not touched the Elephant. But every part of it looked very hard, like something made of metal.

  Sarah was explaining to Rolf that the birds always had difficulty in describing man-made things; some of them could not distinguish between an ax and a sword. The strength of their minds just did not lie in that direction.

  The questioning of the bird had begun to trail off into repetition. The air of hesitancy, of unwillingness to take up the responsibility of leadership, still seemed to dominate the group.

  “Well, someone must be sent to see what this thing is,” Thomas said, looking about him at the others. “One or more of us heavy wingless ones. And as soon as possible. That much is plain.”

  A discussion began on which of the various bands of Free Folk scattered through the countryside was closest to the cave, and which would have the easiest and safest route to get there.

  Thomas cut the discussion short. “We’re only about eighteen kilometers from the cave ourselves—I think it will be fastest after all if one or two of us go from here.”

  Loford was sitting smiling in silent approval as Thomas began to lead. Thomas turned now to the bird and said, “Feathertip—think carefully now. Is there any possible way for a human being to climb to the entrance of this cave of yours?”

  “Whoo. No. Unless they made a stairway in the rock.”

  “How high a stairway would it have to be?”

  “Eleven times as high as you.” On matters of height the birds were evidently very quick and accurate.

  “We are none of us mountain climbers, and we are in a hurry.” Thomas began to pace nervously, then quickly stopped. “We do have ropes, of course. Is there some projection in this cave or about it, around which you could drop a loop of rope, to let us climb?”

  There was no such projection inside the upper cave, Feathertip said after some thought. On the opposite side of the canyon was a pinnacle where she could hang a rope; but a human climbing there would still have to get across the canyon and in beneath an overhang.

  “Could I jump this chasm? How wide is it?”

  The distance of a good running broad jump, it seemed. And it would have to be accomplished from a standing start of precarious footing.

  There was argument, and the rudiment of a plan emerged.

  “Look, we know a bird can’t lift an adult human,” said Thomas. “But we’ve two birds here now, both big and strong of their kind.”

  People interrupted with objections.

  “Let me finish. They can’t lift a man cleanly, but couldn’t they help him jump? Swing him, delay his fall, as he jumps from atop this pinnacle of rock to get across the canyon?”

  The birds both said they thought that something of the sort might just be possible. And no one was able to think of a better plan for getting a human quickly into the cave; of course the ground would have to be examined first. In any case no large party with ladders and other cumbersome equipment could be sent with any safety to work so near the Castle.

  Thomas’s enthusiasm was building steadily. “It must be done somehow, and the birds’ help may make it possible. We’ll see what way looks best when we get there. And there’s no time to waste. If I leave here within the hour, I can be hidden among the rocks on the north side of the pass before dawn. Just lie low during the daylight hours, and then tomorrow night—”

  Loford asked him, “You?”

  Thomas smiled wryly. “Well, you’ve been prodding me to assume some kind of leadership.”

  “This is not a leader’s job. It’s one for a scout. Why you? You’re needed here to make decisions.”

  Others jumped into the argument. It was soon more or less agreed that two people ought to go, but there was no agreement on who they should be. Every man and woman who was not slow with age, or recovering from a wound, volunteered. “Heights don’t scare me at all,” Rolf offered.

  “Me neither!” Sarah wanted to go. She claimed that she was lighter than any of the others, certainly an advantage if it came to a matter of being partially supported by birds.

  “Ah!” said Thomas to her, a spark of humor in his eye. “But what if Nils comes back and finds that you’ve gone off alone with me?”

  That quieted Sarah—for a while—but Thomas found the others’ squa
bbling harder to put down. At last he had to nearly shout, “All right, all right! I know the land as well as anyone. I suppose I can decide as well as anyone what to do about the Elephant when I reach it. So I am going. Loford will be the leader here—so far as I have any authority to name one. Mewick—you must stay in the swamps for a while, to talk to others of our people as they come in, tell them about the situation in the north and elsewhere, so they’ll understand we cannot expect any help…now, let’s see. Will I be light enough to jump into this cave with a boost from two birds?”

  He stretched out his arms. Strijeef and Feathertip took to the air and hovered about him, and each carefully clenched their feet around one of his wrists. Then their wings beat powerfully, the strokes becoming faintly audible, their breeze whipping up sparks and ashes from the remnants of a fire. But Thomas’s feet did not leave the ground. Only when he jumped up could the two birds hold him in the air, and then only for the barest moment.

  “Try it with me!” Sarah now demanded. With great exertion the birds could lift Sarah just about a meter off the ground, and hold her there for a count of three. What jumping she could manage did not help very much.

  She was elated, but Thomas kept shaking his head at her. “No, no. We may have to do some fighting, or—”

  “I can shoot a bow!”

  He ignored her protests, and nodded toward Rolf. “Try him next, he seems about the lightest.”

  The birds rested briefly, then gripped the ends of a piece of rope which Rolf had found and looped around his body under his arms. “At the cave I’ll need my hands free to cling and climb,” he explained. Then he leaped upward with all the spring in his legs, just as the two birds lifted mightily. He rose till his feet were higher than a tall man’s head, from which elevation it took him a count of five to fall to the ground against the birds’ continued pull.

  “Well.” Thomas considered. “That would seem to be about the best that we can do.”