Beast Master's Planet: Omnibus of Beast Master and Lord of Thunder (Beastmaster) (27 page)

Storm drew a single, long, shaky breath that was very close to
something else. His hands lay quiet, drawing strength from that warm clasp.

“Yat-ta-hay,” he said. He was tired, so very tired, but the emptiness was filled with a vast and abiding content he was sure would never ebb again. “Very, very good!”

R

The line camp was not too far ahead. Hosteen Storm’s silent communication with the powerful young stallion under him sent the horse trotting at a steady pace, striking out over a strip of range where yellow grass waved high enough to brush a rider’s leg. Here and there Storm spied a moving blot of blue, the outer fringe of the grazing frawn herd. His sense of direction had not failed him when he took this short cut; they were nearing the river. In the Big Dry no animal strayed more than half a day’s distance from a sure supply of water.

But he had come close to the edge of prudence in staying so long in the hills this time. One of the two canteens linked to his light saddle pad was as dry as the sun-baked rocks at his back, had been so since midmorning of the day before, and the other held no more than a good cup and a half of water. The Norbies, those wide-ranging hunters native to this frontier world, had their springs back in the mountain canyons, but their locations were clan secrets.

Perhaps here and there an off-world settler would be accepted by a clan to the point of sharing water knowledge. Logan might—Hosteen’s well-marked black brows pulled in a fleeting frown as he thought of his Arzoran-born half-brother.

When Hosteen had landed on Arzor a half planet-year earlier, a
veteran of the Confederacy forces after the Xik war, it was as a homeless exile. The last battle of that galaxy-wide holocaust had been a punitive raid to turn Terra into a blue, radioactive cinder. He had had no idea then that Logan Quade existed or that Brad Quade—Logan’s father—could be any more to him than a man he had once sworn to kill.

In the end, the hate-twisted oath demanded of him by his grandfather on Terra had not made Storm a murderer after all. It had been broken just in time and had led him to what he needed most—new roots, a home, kin.

Only happy endings did not always remain so, Hosteen knew now. His emotion was more one of exasperation than disappointment. Though he had appeared to drop into a place already prepared to contain him as easily as his vanished Navajo kinsmen used to fit a polished turquoise into a silver setting, yet another stone in that same setting had come loose during the past few months.

To most riders, the daily round of duties on a frontier holding were arduous enough. There were the dangerous reptilian yoris to hunt down, raiders from the wild Nitra tribe of the Peaks to keep off, a hundred and one other tangles with disaster or even sudden death to be faced. But none of that satisfied Logan. He was driven by a consuming restlessness, which pulled him away from a half-done task to seek out a Norbie camp, to join one of their wide ranging hunts, or just to wander back into the hills.

There was a flicker of black just within eye range in the sky. Hosteen’s lips pursed as if for a whistle, though no sound issued from between their sun-cracked, blood-threaded surfaces. The black dot spiraled down.

The stallion halted without any outward command from his rider. With the peerless swoop of her kind, Baku, the great African Eagle, came in to settle on the pronged rest that formed the horn of Hosteen’s specially designed trail saddle. The bird was panting, her head turned a little to one side as one bright and keen-sighted eye regarded Hosteen steadily.

For a long moment they sat so in perfect rapport. Science had fostered that link between man and bird, had tested and trained man, bred, tested, and trained bird, to form not just a team of two
very different life forms but—when the need arose—part of a smoothly working weapon. The enemy was gone; there was no longer any need for such a weapon. And the scientists who had fashioned it had vanished into ash. But the alliance remained as steadfast here on Arzor as it had ever been on those other worlds where a sabotage and combat team of man, bird, and animals had operated with accurate efficiency.

“Nihich’i hooldoh, t’assh ’annii ya?” Hosteen asked softly, savoring the speech that perhaps he alone now along the stellar lanes would ever speak with fluency. “We’re making pretty good time, aren’t we?”

Baku answered with a low, throaty sound, a click of her hunter’s beak in agreement. Though she relished the freedom of the sky, she wanted no more of its furnace heat in the coming day than he did. When they made the line camp, she would willingly enter its heat-dispelling cavern.

Rain, the stallion, trotted on. He was accustomed now to transporting Baku, having fitted into the animal pattern from off-world with his own contribution, speed and stamina in travel. Now he neighed shrilly. But Hosteen had already caught sight of familiar landmarks. Top that small rise, pass through a copse of muff bushes, and they were at the camp where Logan should be on duty for this ten-day period. But somehow Hosteen was already doubting he would find him there.

The camp was not a building but a cave of sorts in the side of a hillock. Following the example of native inhabitants, the settlers who ran frawns or horses in the plains set their hot weather stations deep in the cool earth. The conditioners, which controlled atmosphere for the buildings in the two small cities, the structures in the small, widely separated towns of the range country, and main houses of the holdings, were too complicated and expensive to be used in line camps.

“Halloooo.” Hosteen raised his voice in the ringing hail of a camp visitor. The recessed earth-encircled doorway of the living quarters was dark. From this distance he could not tell whether it was open or closed. And the wider opening to the stable, which would give the imported horses a measure of protection, was also a blank.

But a minute later a red-yellow figure moved against the red-yellow earth at the side of the mound, and sun glinted brightly on two curves of ivory-white, breaking the natural camouflage of the waiting Norbie by revealing the six-inch horns, as normal to his domed skull as thick black hair was to Hosteen’s. A long arm flashed up, and the rider recognized Gorgol, once hunter of the Shosonna tribe and now in charge of the small horse herd that was Hosteen’s own personal investment in the future.

The Norbie came out of the shade of the hillock to reach for Rain’s hackamore as Hosteen swung stiffly down. Brown Terran fingers flashed in fluid sign talk:

“You are here—there is trouble? Logan—?”

Gorgol was young, hardly out of boyhood, but he had already reached his full growth of limb. His six-foot, ten-inch body, all lean, taut muscle over hard, compact bone, towered over Hosteen. His yellow eyes, the vertical pupils mere threads of black against the sun’s intrusive glare, did not quite meet those of the Terran, but his right hand sketched a sign for the necessity of talk.

Norbie and human vocal cords were so dissimilar as
to
render oral speech between off-worlder and native impossible. But the finger talk worked well between the races. An expert, as most of the range riders had to be, could express complex ideas in small, sometimes nearly invisible movements of thumb and fingers.

Hosteen went into the cave camp, Baku riding his shoulder. And while the coolness of the earth wall could only be a few degrees less than the temperature of the outside, that difference was enough to bring a sigh of content from the sweating man, a cluck of appreciation from the eagle.

The Terran halted inside to allow his eyes to adjust to the welcome dusk. And a single glance about told him he had guessed right. If Logan had been here, he was now gone, and not just for the early-morning duty inspection of the frawn herd. All four wall bunks were bare of sleeping rolls, there was no sign the cook unit had been used that day, and the general litter of a rider, his saddle, tote bag, and canteen, were absent.

But there was something else, a yoris hide bag, its glittering scaled exterior adorned by a feather embroidery pattern that repeated over
and over the conventionalized figure of a Zamle, the flying totem of Gorgol’s clan. That was the Norbie’s traveling equipment—which by every right should have been stowed in a bunk locker at the Center House fifty miles downriver.

Hosteen stretched out his arm to afford Baku a bridge to the perch hammered in the wall. Then he went to the heating unit, measured out a portion of powdered “swankee,” the coffee of the Arzor ranges, and dialed the pot to three-minute service. He heard the faintest whisper behind and knew that Gorgol had deliberately trodden so as to attract his attention. But he was determined to make the other give an explanation without asking any questions himself, and he knew that it was unwise to push.

While the heating unit was at work, Hosteen sailed his hat to the nearest bunk, loosened the throat lacings of his undyed frawn fabric shirt, and pulled it off before he sought the fresher and allowed water vapor to curl pleasantly and coolly about his bare chest and shoulders.

As the Terran came out of the alcove, Gorgol snapped the first swankee container out of the unit, hesitated, and drew a second, which he turned around and around in his hands, staring blank-eyed down at the liquid as if he had never seen its like before.

Hosteen seated himself on the edge of a bunk, cradled the swankee cup in his hand, and waited another long moment. Then Gorgol smacked his container down on the table top with a violence close to anger, and his fingers flew, but not with such speed that Hosteen was unable to read the signs.

“I go—there is a call for all Shosonna—Krotag summons—”

Hosteen sipped the slightly bitter but refreshing brew, his mind working faster than his deliberate movements might indicate. Why would the chief of Gorgol’s clan be summoning those engaged in profitable riders’ jobs? The Big Dry was neither the season for hunting nor for war—both of which pursuits, dear to the tradition and customs of the Norbies, were conducted only in the fringe months of the Wet Time. In the Big Dry, it was rigid custom for the tribes and clans to split into much smaller family groups, each to resort to one of the jealously guarded water holes to wait out the heat as best they could.

All tribes with any settler contacts strove to hire out as many of their men as riders as they could, thus removing hungry and thirsty mouths from clan supply points. To summon
in
men in the Big Dry was a policy so threatened with disaster as to appear insane. It meant trouble somewhere—bad trouble—and something that had developed in the week of Storm’s own absence.

Hosteen had ridden out of the Quade Peak Holding eight days ago—to set up his square stakes and make his claim map before recording it at Galwadi. As a veteran of the forces and a Terran, he was able to file on twenty squares, and he had set out his stakes around a good piece of territory to the northeast, having river frontage and extending into the mountain foothills. There had been no whisper of trouble then, nor had he seen any signs of movement of tribes in the outback. Though, come to think of it, he had not crossed a Norbie trail or met any hunters either. That he had laid to the Big Dry. Now he wondered if more than the rigors of Arzoran seasons had wrung the natives out of the country.

“Krotag summons—in the Big Dry!” Even in finger movements one could insert a measure of incredulity.

Gorgol shifted from one yoris-hide booted foot to the other. His discomfort was plain to one who had ridden with him for months. “There is medicine talk—” His fingers shaped that and then were stiffly straight.

Hosteen sipped, his mind working fast and hard, fitting one small hint to another. “Medicine talk”—was that answer to shut off more questions or could it be the truth? In any event, it stopped him now. You did not—ever—inquire into “medicine,” and his own Amerindian background made him accept that prohibition as a thing necessary and right.

“How long?”

But Gorgol’s straight fingers did not immediately reply. “Not to know—” came reluctantly at last.

Hosteen was still searching for a question that was proper and yet would give him a small scrap of information when there was a clear note from the other end of the cave room, the alerting call of the com, which tied each line camp to the headquarters of the holding. The Terran went to the board, thumbing down the receive button.
What came was no new message but a recall broadcast to be repeated mechanically at intervals, set to bring in all riders. There
was
something going on!

“You ride then for the hills?” he signed to Gorgol.

The Norbie was at the doorway, shouldering his travel bag. Now he paused, and not only the change of his expression showed his troubled mind. It was evident in every movement of his body. Hosteen believed the native was obeying an imperative order, greatly against his own will.

“I ride. All Norbies ride now.”

All Norbies, not just Gorgol. Hosteen digested that and, in spite of himself, vented his surprise in a startled hiss. Quade depended heavily on native riders, not only here at the Peak Holding, but also down at his wider spread in the Basin. And Quade was not the only range man who had a predominance of Norbie employees. If they all took to the hills—! Yes, such an exodus could cripple some of the holdings.

“All Norbies—this, too, is medicine?”

But why? Medicine was clan business as far as Hosteen had been able to learn. He had never heard of a whole tribe or nation combining their medicine meetings and ceremonies—certainly not in the season of the Big Dry. Why, the river lands could not support such a gathering at this time of the year—let alone the arid mountain country.