The Dancers of Noyo (7 page)

             
My joints were loosening up. I was walking faster. I longed to get to some place where I could rest for what remained of the night. I would have liked to fly or run.

             
Run? Fly? But I was really dancing, moving along the road with the hard, stamping step of the Noyo dancers. I'd been dancing for several minutes now.

             
As soon as I realized what I had been doing, I stopped myself. I
could
stop; this wasn't the beginning of another extra-life. But I was conscious of a quiet, constant push in myself toward dancing. It made me feel a little foolish, a little ashamed.
And a little afraid.

-

             
Gift-of-God was feeling carefully over my chest with her chapped, scratchy little hands. The action purported to be a caress, but I had my doubts, and the doubts became certainty when she gave a surreptitious tug at the string of my medicine bag. I had known she was up to something.

             
I lay on my back, staring up at the roof of the sweat-house and trying to think. I had got to Russian Gulch a couple of days ago, and the tribe—it had a bad reputation—had been almost pressingly hospitable. I'd been glad to lie around resting for the first day. I was still suffering from the peculiar fatigue that had afflicted me ever since I started down Highway One, and my mind was confused. But I'd been ready to go on my way for the past twelve hours, and the tribe had thought up one excuse after another to detain me. Gee-Gee's was only the last of a considerable series.

             
Abruptly I sat up, throwing Gee-Gee to one side. "Why'd you bring me here?" I asked.

             
"
Tho
you could have the Grail Vision,
Tham
," she
answered,
all wide-eyed innocence. Sometimes her conversation was as witless as a five-year-
old's
and sometimes as knowing as that
of a teenager on the edge of voting
age. Actually, she was an unpleasant, pitiful little girl of eleven or twelve.

             
"Have the Grail Vision in a smokehouse at Russian Gulch? It isn't reasonable."

             
"Oh,
shure
.
People have it all the time,
Tham
." She moved her head, and the light coming in through the smokehouse door lit up the side of her childish face, showing it to be heavily lined. When I had first seen her, I had thought she was a little old woman. Then she had moved, and I had realized that she was a child.

             
She giggled, and reached out with a ghastly amorousness toward my chest. I drew away from her instinctively. She was under age, she was unattractive, and the girls of my own tribe all had had contraceptives implanted. I was in no state of sexual deprivation, or disposed to be uncritical. I reached for my bow, lying on the hide beside me, and got to my feet.

             
"Where're you going?" Gee-Gee asked, watching me apprehensively.

             
"I'm going to get started on my way down Highway One. I can put a few miles out of the way before it gets dark."

             
She stared at me for a moment. Then she opened her mouth and gave vent to a piercing shriek. It had a clarion quality, a high-pitched penetration, through which the word "Help!" was occasionally audible.

             
I swallowed. Then I started to run. But before I could get to the smokehouse door, two male Russian Gulchers had come pelting in.

             
"What's he
doin
to
ya
, Gee-Gee?" the taller one demanded.

             
"He—he—" She seemed on the verge of angry tears. "He tried to
—
and he tore my dress." She exhibited a small rip in the thin, faded blue fabric.

             
"Rape,
hunh
?" said the shorter man. "Can't you pricks from Noyo even be normal when it comes to shoving the meat? You ought to be ashamed of yourself!
A little bitty girl like that!"

             
"1 didn't,"
I said. I tried to push past him to the door. We scuffled. I hit him on the jaw, and he hit me beside the right eye.

             
The other man joined in the fight. There were two of them, but they were both older than I and rather slow. I managed to hold my own. But then three other Russian Gulchers burst through the door and began hitting me. I went down under a hail of blows.

             
In the end, they tied me up with long witches of
Clematis
ligusticifolia
.
This is a very strong fiber. The Pomo used to make deer nets out of it. They dumped me in a sort of jail, a low, rickety old summer cabin, and stationed a guard in front of the door.

             
I looked around me. My heart was still thumping unpleasantly as a result of the fighting, and the places they had hit me hurt. My eye was beginning to swell up, and I couldn't see any too well, but there didn't seem to be much in the cabin except a bucket and a chair-high section of redwood log. The window had redwood shakes nailed across it like bars.

             
I hobbled over to the window and peered out. The Gulchers were lying around in the sun indolently. After a minute I saw an astonishingly familiar figure walking out of the sweathouse. I squinted. Yes, it was Brotherly Love.

             
Brotherly.
What was he doing here? Russian Gulch is only a few miles from Noyo, but we never visited each other. Things were apt to disappear mysteriously when the Gulchers were around.

             
Brotherly went behind a clump of ceanothus. He came out riding my motorbike.

             
I must have made some sort of noise, for my guard jumped up, scowling. "Get away from that window!" he yelled. He shook a club of mountain mahogany at me.

             
I went back to the redwood slab and sat down on it. I was badly puzzled. I didn't know why the Gulchers had elected to jump me, and I couldn't think what Brotherly had been doing in their company. The answer was perfectly simple, of course; but ever since I had been Alvin Riggs, my thinking had been confused.

             
Suddenly, it came to me that I had to escape. Whatever the Gulch tribe was up to, it was plainly nothing good. I began to work at my bonds.

             
The Gulchers weren't very good at woodsy lore, and I had had sense enough to expand my chest and keep my wrists apart while the smelly sods were tying me up. (All the Gulchers stank of sweat.) I had a little slack to work with.
But for half an hour or so it didn't do me any good.
The clematis strips were like leather, and my wrists were beginning to swell. What finally turned the scales was that I began to sweat copiously, and the moisture acted as a lubricant.

             
Once my hands were free, my feet were simple enough. Now what? The window was barred, the door was bolted, and there was a guard in front of the door.

             
I thought fleetingly of trying to tunnel out under the rear wall, but it would take too long, and I had nothing to dig with.

             
I remembered something I had read in a paperback short-story collection when I was a kid: that the weak spot of an amateur jail was apt to be its roof. I moved the section of log so it was under the lowermost of the rafters. Then I got up on the log and pushed.

             
Nothing happened. I couldn't exert enough leverage with my hands. I readjusted the log so it was quite a lot closer to the wall and got up on it once more. Now, with my knees bent, I had my powerful back muscles to help me. I began to push.

             
Cobwebs tickled. There was a lot of dust
.
I
hoped I wouldn't sneeze. I hoped the guard wouldn't look in. I was shaking with the strain. Then, with almost no noise, the edge of the roof went up an inch or two.

             
Fine.
It could be done. I hopped down and looked about for something to wedge under the roof. The bucket was too flimsy, and I needed the section of log to stand on. Finally I found a piece of oak, still with the bark on and bearing ax marks, in a dusty corner. Somebody had tried to split it and failed.

             
I
got the roof up about six inches this time and let it down gently on the oak. Up the wall, through the gap with a good deal of scraping on my buttocks—the gap was only about four inches wide—and down the other side. I was out. It had been wonderfully easy, actually.

             
I stood there panting for a moment. I planned to make a wide circuit of the Gulchers' camp through the bushes and rejoin Highway One a good deal further down. I didn't think the Gulchers would pursue me very far on foot, and it ought to be several hours before they missed me. But
I
wished I had my bow. I felt empty-handed and defenseless without it.

             
There were bushes contiguous to the back of the shack where I had been imprisoned, and I made my way through clumps of ceanothus and an occasional rhododendron until I came to an open space. Nobody seemed to have noticed my escape. I had had wonderful
luck ,so
far. But the open space offered difficulties. I hesitated on the edge of it.

             
There was no use in waiting. I set out across it, hoping that a brisk, unhurried pace would keep a distant spectator from getting suspicious.

             
It might have, except that Gee-Gee, when I was almost across the clearing,
came
ambling along from the women's latrine. I don't know where she was on her way to. Anyhow, the instant she spied me, she set up a piercing shriek. I don't see how such a wizened child could make so much noise.

             
An instant later, assorted Russian Gulchers came bursting through the thicket. I, of course, had taken to my heels as soon as Gee-Gee started her keening.
I
headed downslope, toward the beckoning ribbon of Highway One.

             
I probably could have made it, since I was younger than any of my pursuers, except that one of them had the presence of mind to shoot me in the back with a blunt arrow. It knocked the wind out of me, and by the time I had recovered myself, they were swarming over me with clubs.

             
They tied my wrists much more securely this time, but they didn't take me back immediately to my jail. Instead, they marched me off to see the local Dancer.

             
Dancers are all grown from the same clone, an aggregate of cells from the body of the late, well-known Bennet. So every Dancer is identical with every other Dancer, at least initially. It is always a shock, though, to see how identical they are. This one was a perfect replica of the Noyo Dancer, even to its loincloth. The only difference between the two was that this one had a broad
metal band around its upper arm, like a bracelet. It even had a whip like the Noyo Dancer's in its hand.

             
A couple of men were stamping around in the circle below its dais. They were older than the dancers I was used to. The Dancer let me and my escorts cool our heels for several minutes while it watched the dancers. Then it said something to us in the same old fruity voice.

             
I hardly noticed what it was saying. As soon as I had seen the men moving in the circle I had begun to feel an urgent desire to move my feet, hobbled though they were, in the rhythm of the dance. It took all my willpower to keep them still.