The Second Ardath Mayhar Page 10

  One could go just so far into the lonely grayness. There were only so many steps in a pair of legs, only so much hope in any human heart. When those things were exhausted, it was time to go.

  He fumbled with the cartridge belt in his pack. Twenty rounds left. Enough for all, if they decided to take that route. They’d find the gun when he was done with it.

  He slipped the pistol from the holster and moved down the side of the ridge toward a ravine.

  The children wouldn’t see his body, down there.

  One quick move, a jerk of the finger...and he went out into the lone gray.

  THE DAY OF THE DRUM

  This was a very early sf story, which I sent to the editor at Galaxy Magazine. Mr. Gold returned it, saying that I was totally unsuited to writing sf and should find another genre. If he had praised me and told me to go ahead, he might have stopped me. Fortunately, I am one who does not accept discouragement.

  Juluah paused on the crest of the ridge. Below her the rift was sinking into black-purple shadow, though the heights along its farther edge were still tipped with red-gold by the setting sun. Her ears were honed to catch any whisper of wrongness amid the sounds of the evening. She lingered for a moment, watching the bright death of the day.

  About her the thick leaves of the forest stirred in the twilight breeze. The first boom of the d’hangi came as a shock, shattering the peace. That sonorous reverberation was followed by others, patterned to convey to her trained ear a message as clear as if it were spoken.

  Juluah stood quietly, her head cocked to catch every element of the message, but her hand, clenched on the haft of her spear, belied her seeming calm. Her eyes now probed the sheer drop she must descend, not for beauty now but for danger.

  A minuke in the tree above her had gone silent at the first note of the drum. Now it stared down at her, and though she did not turn her head, Juluah felt its gaze. Insects and animals alike had gone silent in the jungle cloaking the shoulders of the mountain. Wild creatures had short lives, and she knew none had heard the voice of the d’hangi before now.

  Now in middle age, Juluah had heard it in her youth. When the last echo died, she turned her gaze up toward the minuke, which held its small hand before its mouth, shocked by the noise. Its slender body quivered, and Juluah reached up to smooth its golden fur with bronzed fingers. Without her long years of discipline, she too might quiver, she knew, for the voice of the d’hangi was the voice of death.

  The sun had now set, but she waited until the trail downward was deep in shadow. Her mission had not been one of grave importance, but all had changed with the words of the drum. She must deliver not only the word she carried from Ellehi, her chieftain, but also terrible tidings to the neighboring people beyond the rift. All were now in danger.

  For the three nights of her journey, she had dreamed ill. Now she knew why: the Deep Ones had emerged from underground. Once more they were walking the daytime forest, armed with dark weapons and the hearts of slavers.

  Shuddering, she started down the dim trail. Her training as a Messenger enabled her to go down that perilous way; pitfalls of vine and loose shale could not betray her knowing feet. By the time the stars had rolled past the edge of the height, she reached the bottom of the way and made her way beside the river, which had chewed a long and crooked path through the stone of the mountains.

  Ellehi called her the swiftest Messenger among the Kora’ah, though she did not allow need for haste to make her careless. She sped along the narrow track worn into the stone by millennia of paws and hooves. There would be no enemy here, she knew, but there were other forces the Deep Ones could call. She could feel danger before her. Shifting her spear to her left hand, she drew her long blade with her right.

  The stars gave little light. Juluah’s world had no moon. She strained her eyes into the darkness as she moved between the great stone blocks that had fallen from the cliffs over the millennia. Beasts laired among the monoliths, and the way was narrow.

  It was hazardous to make a light, for she would become a target for anyone who waited. Yet it would be worse to go, blind, into their hands. Making the holy sign with her spear-point, she reached into her tunic and drew out a smooth stone, cool to the touch. She warmed it between her hands and fitted it into a loop in the thong that had bound her hair. Once the weight settled, she concentrated her will upon it.

  A firefly glow began to flicker within the stone. That grew in intensity, radiating outward to light the path ahead, where it pricked out many light-points among the other stones.

  Eyes. Waiting.

  Juluah slanted her spear forward and gripped her blade as she moved onward. A knobby shape, glossy-black as coal, darted forward to lob a pebble at her head. Deadly in speed and accuracy, it flicked past her ear as she ducked.

  She thrust her spear into the dark shape that had flung the stone; it made no sound as she pulled the point free, but it did not move again. Others came at her, dodging and darting, and she hewed and thrust, beset from all sides. The creatures had no caution, but they seemed strangely mindless. The touch of metal seemed to render them helpless as well.

  Still those deadly pebbles whizzed past her head to bruise shoulders and arms and jaw. Only her Messenger’s agility and warrior’s skill brought her out of the rock-maze alive. Behind her she left still black shapes that would, she thought, turn in time back into heaps of rock.

  When there were no more, she used her light to examine the path before and behind, but no further enemy could be seen. Removing the stone from the loop, she returned it to her pouch and the thong to her hair.

  Dawn found her climbing, for she had crossed the river by way of a chain of boulders formed by some long-ago landslip. Now she moved through even thicker jungle that grew on the other side of the rift. As the light grew stronger, she glimpsed beasts returning from their nightly hunts, and they were not like the animals beyond the river. Even the birds sang unfamiliar songs.

  Her way wound in curves and switchbacks. Twice she found great serpents lying across the path, catching the first warmth of the newly risen sun. The first was small, and she leaped over, but the second was huge, its girth greater than her own.

  Looped across the cut from tree to tree, it watched with knowing eyes as she approached. The arrow-shaped head, the width of her two hands together, swayed head-high before her. The sheer face, straight up on her right, was indented with gashes of stone from which softer stuff was weathered away, offering a way around.

  “Wait here, Old One,” she said, laughing. “If one of the Dark Ones comes, you have my leave to greet him.” Then she leaped for the wall of the path and clambered up and around.

  Before the sun was high, she was at the top of the cliff. From that height she could see a thin column of smoke rising from the compound of the Gelu’ah, and she called a shrill summons into the morning. There was no waiting, for behind her there came the soft sound of an arrow being nocked. She turned slowly, her hands clear of her weapons, to see a boy standing beside a rock that showed traces of a watchfire.

  “Who comes to my people?” the boy asked.

  She smiled, for he was very young—almost as young as her last son, who had seen twelve summers. She did not smile but answered him as she would have replied to a chieftain.

  “Juluah, Messenger of the Kora’ah. I bear two messages for Keloha and your elders from Ellehi and the elders of my tribe.”

  His bronze face impassive, he regarded her, but she could see a faint quirk at the corner of his lips. “All have heard the d’hangi. Is there war among the Kora’ah?” he asked.

  “Among us all, I fear,” she said. “I did not come to bring that word, but it overtook me in the voice of the d’hangi. I must speak with your elders.”

  Those elders waited before the circle of mud-plastered wicker huts, outside the stake fence that kept predators outside the village. Keloha strode forward. �
��Greeting, Messenger. What word do you bring from my brother Ellehi? Is there war abroad in the land?”

  “When I left Ellehi there was peace, and a harvest so abundant that I was sent to bring you and yours to a feast. The drum altered that, for it spoke of the Deep Ones. On this side of the river do you know its language?”

  “Only a bit. Yet I have dreamed....” His dark eyes stared into hers, and she knew his dreams must have mirrored her own. “Ill dreams indeed. Come to the Council house, Messenger. We must speak together.”

  When she had eaten and drunk and rested a bit, the elders came into the house and sank into their usual circle. She began, “Juluah, Messenger of the Kora’ah, to Keloha of the Gelu’ah, greetings from his brother Ellehi. I will not speak his words, for they no longer hold meaning. Instead I will speak the words of the drum.

  “Just before sunset, a way believed to be sealed beyond opening was opened from below, and the Deep Ones emerged into our world. Armed with the weapons of rational beings, they carried also tubes of metal that set our village ablaze. Yet some of our boys slipped through a channel too small for their elders. They turned the tubes over and stopped their mouths with clay, slaying with their knives the Deep Ones who operated them.

  “Our enemies are left with blades and spears, and even now we battle them. Many have died and will die, yet we know this is not the only place where they may emerge. We are not the only village marked for death or slavery. Aid us, if you will. Safeguard yourselves, if you can.”

  She fell silent. No one spoke for a time. Then the boy asked, “But who are the Deep Ones?”

  The elders nodded, and Juluah said, “Upon our world there were always two peoples: those who live in sunlight and follow the paths of peace, when that is possible; we are a free people and kill nothing needlessly.

  “The others live beneath the mountains in caverns and tunnels at their roots, digging out the bones of the heights to melt for metal. They are not demons, though they hide themselves from the light and work in the midnight places. They hate us who walk free, even the animals.”

  She held up her spear before the boy. “The very weapons we bear were made by them, for we do not work metals. These are the spoils of generations of battles.”

  The boy’s eyes widened. “But there must be things we might trade them for such things. We have little metal, but they surely have too little fruit and cloth. Why do we not barter with them?”

  “They do not want the things we make and grow. They want our strong backs and clever hands to work in their mines and smelters. They want slaves, my son, grubbing away our lives in the bowels of the earth to stoke their fires, shut away from the sun forever. Nothing else will they consider, for they will not speak with our kind, considering us cattle.

  “Sometimes twice in a generation, sometimes more often, they break forth from the depths and try again to conquer us. Always, they have failed.”

  Keloha’s voice boomed forth like the d’hangi. “Always they shall fail. Rest, Juluah, and tomorrow speed homeward bearing word that the Gelu’ah follow hard upon your heels.”

  “Ellehi will be grateful, as will all my people. Rest well, elders of the Gelu’ah,” she said.

  She rose before the sun and was well into the gorge before nightfall, resting in a niche in a boulder for the night. That stone was rooted in the bed-rock, and all through the night she felt growlings and stirrings, as if stone ground against stone. At first light she sped forward toward the distant cliff.

  As she passed the moonlight, they shimmered beneath the sun, and about them lay dark heaps that had been her enemies. Bereft of the will that had formed them, they had returned to their natural state. What strange skills, she wondered, could shape moving forms from rock?

  She found the path up the cliff at last and climbed it without noticing the lovely light of sunset. With the last of twilight, she reached the crest and rested. A sound reached her, careless feet moving on the narrow ledge running along the shoulder of the ridge. A minuke stirred uneasily, and she shrank into the jungle, melting into the thick growth of trees and vines.

  The path was a gray blur, but the dark shape that came stood out sharply. Totally black, surely by use of paint over skin, with broad gray stripes lining its face, it was a Deep One, walking abroad, alone.

  His steps thumped arrogantly against the stone, frightening the small creatures. He paused where she had stood to watch the sunset; the minuke gave a squeak, and the Deep One looked up. From his hand, a tube squirted a fine mist into the air, and the minuke dropped, lifeless. His laugh grated like gravel pouring down a hillside.

  Leaning her spear against a tree, Juluah grasped her blade and stepped silently into the pathway. “Guard yourself!” she said.

  The Deep One whirled, bringing up the tube, but her blade flicked out and sent it whirling into the depths below. His own blade whipped into sight, glinting in the near darkness. “You dare to face me? I am a master of this world. You sun-cattle cannot hope to withstand us!”

  “Guard yourself,” Juluah said again. She lunged, and his blade barely turned aside her thrust. She parried the counterthrust easily, and her rush moved him toward the edge of the cliff.

  He battered her back again, using his greater weight and power, but she held him behind a barrier of steel. That was a strange duel they fought, blinded by night with only gasps and clangs to give Juluah some clue to his position and intentions.

  The breeze picked up, and the flutter of his cloak gave her a hint. Taking a chance, she lunged low, hoping to thrust beneath his guard. Metal grated on bone, and he grunted. She heard a swish as his blade swung toward her, but she rolled away and heard his fall.

  His blade gleamed in starlight, lying on the path. She kicked it away to clatter amid the stones below. Taking the light-stone from her pouch, she warmed it between her hands and looked down at him.

  His eyes glittered with desperation and dismay, but her blade was near his throat, and he was lying along the verge of the cliff. His right bicep was thrust through, disabling him, though it was a clean wound and not fatal.

  “Will you listen?” she asked.

  He said nothing, and his eyes seemed shuttered against anything she might say. She laid her blade against the skin of his brow, marking it with the sigil of the Kora’ah.

  “Now will you listen?” The tip of her sword was at his throat. Those eyes were now aware and afraid.

  “We who live in the light do not trouble you in the Deep. Labor there until you wear the mountains away to plains, if it pleases you, but we will not slave there for you. We will not be conquered; we will die before we will be slaves. Corpses cannot delve in your mines or feed your fires. To be master of the dead is nothing.

  “I could kill you now, but what would that accomplish? One more carcass for the carrion birds? Take my words back to your people: live as you will. Labor as you choose, but learn that you cannot conquer the people of the light.”

  He would not meet her gaze, there in the tenuous light. As if he were ashamed to be answering her kind at all, he whispered, “My people would not listen to such words. This time we shall win...you will learn this. This time we cannot be denied.”

  As if in reply, the d’hangi boomed, rolling across the land and echoing from the mountains. Juluah cocked her head, listening.

  “Do you understand the words of the drum?” she asked.

  He shook his dark head.

  “Then hear them through my lips. The Deep Ones are driven from the valley of the Hasha’ah, and that tribe has come to aid the Kora’ah. The attackers, their numbers much diminished, are trapped in the north angle of our valley. If the Gelu’ah come, we will destroy them. If the Gelu’ah do not come, we will drive them into their tunnels and seal them into the darkness once again.”

  She looked down at the Deep One, her lightstone bathing his face and making him squint. “And the Gelu’a
h will come; they are behind me, less than half a day.”

  The Deep One groaned and struggled to sit. Now there was fear in his eyes. “You will...free me? Even now?”

  “Especially now,” she said. “After being driven like vermin into their burrows, surely your people will hear you speak my words. It is easy to forget the mettle of an enemy your parents battled, but one who has just trampled you into the dust must be taken seriously. Go back into the darkness. Emerge, if you can, as reasonable people, ready to bargain instead of to enslave.”

  He rose, holding his injured arm carefully. She didn’t wait for him to choose a direction but brushed past and picked up the tube he had dropped. She carried it into the jungle and buried it deep, with the body of the minuke.

  When she returned to the path, the Deep One had gone. She moved forward toward the valley of her people, who would need her skill and her blade.

  Once all the Deep Ones were pushed back into the depths, the Gelu’ah would attend a feasting, after all. Perhaps, this time, it would be a feast of hope as well as one of victory.

  DEEP WOODS LADY

  To a great extent I am this lady, and her solution to her noisy neighbors was one used by one of my sons in similar circumstances.

  I’ve lived in the woods for most of my life. Once in a while someone asks me if I’m not afraid, living out here all by myself, with the nearest neighbor a half-mile away. That’s funny! I’ve never had a bobcat or possum or coyote come breaking in my door to rob me. I can walk down my woodsy road in the evening and no mugger will attack me, though I do carry a snake stick. Water moccasins tend to be mean-natured, and it’s just as well to have something to discourage them with.

  My road ends at a river that runs into a big man-made lake, and everybody and his Uncle Ned comes scallyhooting down my road, pulling boat trailers at top speed. They go by so fast that they never spot my oddball house, which is hidden behind a thick hedgerow and in the middle of a cluster of big trees, yaupon bushes, and wisteria, Virginia creeper, yellow jasmine, and rattan vines. When I was younger, I used to keep the smaller growth pruned back, but the older I get the more I appreciate my home-grown jungle, so I let it go, unless it impedes something necessary.