Hiero Desteen: 01 - Hiero's Journey (19 page)

They rode in silence along the beach for a little way, and then in a small voice, she asked, "Do you mean I can't learn at all, that I'm already too old?"

"Good Lord, no," the surprised Hiero said. "I'll try to teach you myself when we have a moment. I simply meant it takes training, discipline, practice, and time. You may be a marvel at it and go extra fast."

Before he could even move, she had whipped around, eyes gleaming, and given him a tremendous hug. "Wonderful! Can we start now, right away?"

"Well, I, uh, well, that is, I hadn't ..."

Most of the day passed quickly, in doing lessons. Actually, Hiero thought to himself, it was probably a damned good idea to have to recall all the basics he had learned in the Abbey schools. Luchare was very clever and she was also willing to work. The one thing she apparently wanted above all else in the world was to talk to Gorm and Klootz, and this was the goal Hiero held out to her as a reward. But he spoke bluntly first.

"Now listen to me, carefully. The shield for your own thoughts is the most important thing you can learn, and it has to be learned first."

When she wondered why, he explained that, with a decent mind shield, a child could evade the grip of the most skilled adept alive, as long as the two were not either very close physically to one another or linked by an emotional bond of some kind.

"But if you start sending messages without any ability to defend yourself, why, the Unclean could actually grab your mind, take control of it, and force you either to go to them or else to do whatever they wanted, commit murder, maybe, or anything! Even with a conscious shield, or the ability to create one, if you use the powers of your mind too widely, then another mind can home in on you, as if you were a target. That's what they've been trying to do to me for the last week, and it took quite a while to stop them completely from annoying me.
Now
do you understand why what I say is important?"

"I'm sorry, Per Hiero. I'll let you be the guide. Only," she burst out, "please hurry, that's all. Somehow, I feel it's very important! Why," she added, "don't the Unclean control everybody's
mind, if so many are unshielded?"

He laughed. "I'm sure it is important, at least to you. Now let's review what I just taught you. But first, the Unclean can't control an
unconscious
mind, one that isn't sending at all, unless they have the person in their physical power or in close contact. Now, to begin, the shield is to be conceived by your mind as an arc, surmounted by the Cross. Visualize this and then practice, with your eyes open, making it appear in your physical vision, so that the picture blocks out the horizon. Next—" He droned on, using his superb memory simply to repeat what old Per Hadena used to use as the basis for his lectures. This allowed Hiero to think of other things and to keep watch. He kept an eye out for the enemy flier, but no trace of it appeared. Many hawks were in the sky, though, and he saw them diving on the countless water birds. Once they came to a place where a small herd of the great water pigs lay floating near the shore. At the sight of the travelers, the big, shiny-creatures submerged in a welter of foam and vanished.

At another time they had to cross the marsh, previously-glimpsed, where a long, skinny finger of the Palood thrust south and caused an oozing stream to drain into the Inland Sea. Hiero had Klootz and the bear gallop across the dirty shallows at the juncture of marsh and sea, while he watched the giant reeds carefully. Nothing appeared, however, and the whole area was only a quarter of a mile wide. Once through it, the pleasant sandy shore began again.

They camped that night under a rock overhang, and Hiero allowed a tiny fire, first bringing a rock over to screen it even from the water, which the girl thought amusing.

"There are ships out there, you know," he reminded her. "Probably very few contain anyone or anything friendly. You ought to remember; you were on one. And a fire might draw other unpleasant things too, not human at all." Having silenced her, he relented, and after supper (the last snapper egg), he allowed the lessons to continue.

"I want you to realize something," he said next. "I could speed those lessons up considerably. The way to do it, and it's sometimes done in an emergency, is to go into your mind and do the teaching there. But I'm not going to."

"Why not?" she asked. "I don't mind, and if it will help make things go fester—"

"You don't know what you're saying." He threw a tiny stick on the fire and poked it gently. The soft night breeze brought them many sounds. The muffled grunting from down the beach to the west was probably the water pigs they had passed earlier. The squawking from offshore, which rose and fell, came from the sleeping flocks of waterfowl. Far away, so far as to be almost inaudible, a big cat screamed once. Little waves broke on the beach in front of their camp, a gentle splashing which never ceased.

Hiero went on gently. "To do what would have to be done, I would need to get into your mind almost completely. Do you want me to know your innermost thoughts, dreams, hopes, and fears, many of which are in what the ancients knew as the subconscious? That means the part of your mind which doesn't
think
so much as it does
feel.
Just reflect on that idea for a minute."

Her face was serious in the firelight. "I see what you mean," she said. "Thanks for being so patient. It's hard not to want to do everything quickly, because it all sounds so marvelous. It's a new world to me. But I see what you mean. No one would want someone else to know
everything.
Unless they were—or maybe not even then. I mean—"

"I know what you mean," he said in a firm voice. "And the answer is no, not even then. If two people in love open their minds to one another, they always shield something of the conscious mind and all of the subconscious. Now let's go back and review the techniques I told you to use in practicing. First ..."

The next morning, Hiero felt a bit tired, but Luchare was as bright as ever. She wanted to work all day, and he finally had to call a halt, as much to give himself a rest as anything else. But when they rested at noon, he allowed her to try and call Gorm. To her inexpressible delight, the bear actually "heard" her mind voice and, as Hiero observed, seemed pleased too, almost as pleased as the girl herself.

The day was bright and clear again, and neither bear nor morse could feel the tingle of any coming weather change in their sensitive bodies. This made Hiero worry a little, though he said nothing as they journeyed on. The Lightning was about as close to being an infallible sign as existed in the whole Forty, While the priest felt himself to be only a mediocre artist in the use of the symbols, still he was not
that
bad. Or was he? Still, perhaps the time element was the key. He turned to thoughts of other matters and allowed himself to forget his puzzlement.

Another night and day passed. Once they saw a flock of huge, running birds, apparently flightless, racing up the beach far ahead, but beyond noting that they were a dark green in color, could see nothing more. Whatever they were, they had excellent eyesight and were extremely alert and wary.

The next night, by the light of the now full moon, Hiero hooked a huge, round-bodied fish, weighing over a hundred pounds, he believed. Everyone helped, and once, when they thought its thrashing would break the line, Gorm waded into the water and walloped at it with an expert paw, which tamed it enough for Hiero and Luchare to haul it out. Even Klootz pranced around in excitement, although when they began to clean it, he snorted and went back to his fodder of bushes and his sentry go.

Everyone else fell asleep full of fried fish, the bear so round the priest thought he would burst. Lots of fish were smoked and packed for the future, something which always pleased Hiero, who had the true woodsman's feeling of not wasting the almost imperishable trail rations, the
pemeekan
and biscuit.

The next day dawned cloudy. As they set off, a very gentle rain, hardly more than a heavy mist, began to fall, and Hiero got out his spare waterproof hood for Luchare. But it was not really uncomfortable, and the weather remained very warm, even at night.

The mild rain continued all night and into the next day. It was much too misty to see far. They paused briefly at noon and ate, then went on as usual. The sea was calm, but the fog had
increased and a vague malaise was growing in Hiero's mind. He now wished he had used another bird the last time it had been clear and that he had looked ahead. Once again the thought of the Lightning came to him. A mild drizzle and a mist were hardly bad weather, at least in the sense of that particular symbol. It was most peculiar.

Luchare had been practicing her exercises very hard, which had made her unwontedly silent for the previous two days. She was now good enough to exchange mental "baby talk" with the bear, and Gorm also seemed to enjoy being told to
stop
and
go,
to
pick
(up)
that stick,
and in general to be ordered about like a not-very-intelligent dog. But as the afternoon passed, Hiero grew more and more uncomfortable and he finally told them both to stop using their minds, even at this close range. He could not see why he was disturbed, yet he trusted his instincts enough to believe there was a reason. Klootz and the bear seemed conscious of nothing out of the way, however.

Nevertheless, when disaster struck, the priest knew that it was his fault and that he had not been prepared or even alert, for that matter. In retrospect, the enemy had laid the trap with great care.

But if only Gorm had not been walking next to Klootz, if Hiero had not been laughing at the girl's mental effort to make the bear pick up a dead fish. If—if—if!

At first glance, the little bay looked utterly empty. They had rounded another of the innumerable rocky points which thrust through the sand and out into the water when they came upon it. The mist partly shrouded some small islets just offshore. On the shore itself, a few hummocks of gray stone, their feet circled by olive-colored scrub palmetto, reared about the lighter sand of the beach. Only the lapping of tiny wavelets broke the silence of early evening as Hiero checked the morse, some evanescent doubt troubling his mind.

He urged Klootz forward just as Gorm suddenly ran ahead of them, nose lifted high as he caught a rank scent. Luchare, unaware of any tension, laughed happily as she watched, finding the bear's pose ridiculous.

The rocks and bushes on the beach erupted leaping figures. A horde of fur-covered, bounding Leemute horrors, stub-tailed and with glistening fangs, resembling giant, distorted monkeys seen in a nightmare, came at them from all sides but the rear. As they came, their ululating, echoing cry, long familiar to Hiero on the northern marches, rang out in hideous familiarity. In their hands the Hairy Howlers bore long spears and clubs and brandished great knives.

Yet this was not the chief menace, bad as it appeared. From behind a small island of granite, a long, black vessel, bare of any mast, glided smoothly only a few hundred feet offshore. On its foredeck, hooded figures bent over a shining metal mechanism whose short-pointed, solid barrel was aimed at the morse and his riders.

The priest reacted by instinct, the unconscious, trained Killman taking over. His reflexes were thus even faster than either those of the bear or of his own great steed.

Get back out!
was his savage message to Klootz and Gorm as, thrower in hand, he slipped from the saddle. The girl, frozen in surprise, simply stayed fixed desperately in her place as the morse turned about on his own rear end, so to speak, almost squatting in his effort to obey the command he had been given. He was already twenty paces away in the first of a series of great bounds when his master fell.

Hiero had been bringing the thrower into aim, determined not to miss the boat and its menacing weapon, when the Unclean gunner fired first.

There was a streak of blue fire and the stink of ozone. Hiero felt a terrible blow on' his chest and a moment of intense cold as he blacked out. His last thought as he slid into darkness was,
So this is what the Lightning meant!

Then—nothingness.

-

Hiero's first sensation was of pain, the second of movement. Instinctively, the pain made him try to rise, but he found he was hindered, that he could not. This in turn made him realize that he was lying on his back on something hard which moved gently, heaving restlessly up and down, sideways and back, in a regular rhythm.

The pain was centered in the middle of his breast, a constant ache of tremendous proportions which sent ripples of lesser pain throughout his whole body. His right hand was free, and instinctively it sought his chest. It there encountered a hard object of unfamiliar shape and fumbled with it.
That's wrong,
his mind said indignantly.
The Cross and Sword should be there!

He realized at this point that his eyes were open and had been for some time. He was in total darkness, then, or almost total. A very faint line of light, a little below eye level, showed some way off. As he tried to concentrate on it and at the same time block off the pain by Abbey techniques, memory also returned.

The Lightning! Something very like real lightning had apparently been used on him. The meaning of the little symbol had been its rarest attribute, then, and it had tried to warn him that he would actually be struck by the strange weapon on the Unclean boat's deck. And he was on an anchored boat now, probably the same one. He had been on small vessels of the Republic many times and on traders' boats too. The feeling was unmistakable.