The Loafers of Refuge (19 page)

The girl was panting heavily when she reached him and he slowed his pace till she recovered. When her breathing eased she said, “I come to show you the easier path.”

Timmy raised his eyebrows in mild surprise, but said nothing. He had not been aware there were two paths through the mountains.

The girl led him slightly past the rocky path to the open pass he could see in the distance, and along a trail that climbed precipitously upward until it debouched into a small flat cup cut into the side of the mountain. A deep fissure led directly into the heart of the rocks. It was obviously an old streambed of the Sweetwater River, and the spot where he stood had once formed the lip of a high waterfall. It must have been a beautiful vista before the course of the stream had changed somewhere higher in the mountains.

“The streambed runs straight and narrow for many miles,
and the bottom is sand and easy on the feet,” said the girl, halting. “When you reach the end—as all good things must end, which my people in time will learn—you must go forward over the rough rocks for only a little way, keeping the rising sun always in your eyes, and you will find the beginning of another old streambed which will take you down to the lowland again. I wish you good fortune.”

She turned and would have run away, but Timmy called her back. “I thank you for your help, and would ask your name,” he said gravely.

“My help is nothing, and I give it gladly. My name is Bilejah, daughter of Brixta, and the name I will not give so freely, and, I feel, not without much suffering and pain. And now goodbye.”

The strange child turned and was gone.

The little cup was swiftly filling with darkness, the great shadows of the Whitecaps running across the valley floor towards him. Timmy turned into the narrow opening, already gloomy in the dim light, and set off down it at a trot. It was cool at this height and he ran for only a short time. When true darkness came he stopped and ate from his pack, doing without water because there was none easily available. A hole scooped into the sand made him a bed, and the wirtl-cloak provided adequate warmth.

Timmy was awake and had eaten before daylight, and within an hour found some water, a small stream trickling down the side of the steep slope, to become lost in the sand. He ate again just before dark, still on the move, and kept going till the last rays of light faded away. He spent that second night at the foot of the rocky wall that separated the two streambeds of which Bilejah had spoken.

He found the second streambed at daybreak without any trouble, and in climbing over the high shoulder separating the two discovered he was almost out of the mountains. When the sun reached the zenith he was at the base of the chain, and by dark he was walking again on heavy grass, and around him were the familiar shapes of ochre-green trees.

Timmy knew, both from his own folklore and geography lessons in night-school, that this forest east of the Whitecaps
extended for over two hundred miles before gradually thinning out into scattered woods and grassy areas similar to the territory around Refuge. For this reason it had not been chosen as an Earth colony, and its inhabitants were a few Loafer tribes. In time, Timmy knew, the mighty forest would yield to the encroachments of the farmers, but at present there was so much grassy land available in the high-rain areas it was not economic to clear trees.

He ran through the forest at a steady lope, seeing the usual multitude of life that frequented these forest glades, and ignoring it. He stopped when the light became too poor for running, and easily found the cache of a small nut-gathering mammal in the gathering dark. With his lean fingers he cracked the nuts, one against the other, and ate all he needed, supplementing his diet with some early-ripening fruits from nearby bushes. He went to bed full-stomached, and without having touched his shoulder pack.

Timmy covered the two hundred miles of forest in three days, his lean body and hard muscles easily adapting to the demands of a constant trot. He was beginning to feel the effects of prolonged exertion—a certain residual tiredness in the leg muscles, lack of reserve energy for sudden efforts—when the woods began to thin. He had seen three separate traces of Loafer cultures in the forest, but had not encountered a living soul in all its vast expanse.

This new country of grassy, rolling hills, marked by clumps of trees scattered seemingly at random over the landscape, reminded him very much of home, but the altitude was at least two thousand feet above sea level and the climate far more dry. He slowed to a walk and began to eat more heavily, munching nuts and fruits picked as he passed. He also dipped into his pack and ate some dried fish.

He became aware he had passed into Loafer country again when he saw the breshwahr tree.

The short, heavy trunk and rounded bushy top were unmistakable, but the strong sense of
presence
which the intelligent breshwahr emitted was completely absent. Timmy stopped, lay down on the heavy grass and closed his eyes, opening his mind fully to reception. There was nothing, not a trace of
consciousness except the dim minds of nearby animals. He tried projecting to the tree, and again there was nothing. He tried again, harder, and suddenly there was an answer, and a sense of presence that was overwhelming in its intensity. But it was not the tree.

Greetings to you, stranger. Who are you, that pass our way and attempt to talk to the breshwahr in the olden way?

The sense impressions were clear and loud, as much so as if they had been spoken into his ear. They were accompanied by a vague image of a woman, an old one, and of wisdom such as is seldom seen. Behind the total impression, lurking dimly but omnipresent in the background, was the sense of approaching death.

Of all his tribe only the two child prodigies, his cousins Micka and Sanda, could project clear speech that way, though anyone trained to be a Controller could receive and understand.

Instead of trying to project an answer Timmy opened his perception, tracing his consciousness of impinging thought until he had a specific and certain direction from which the message came.

There was a small chuckle in his mind, and a sense of understanding. But the only words received were,
Come to me.

Timmy set off through the woods at a brisk trot, and his unwavering feet led him off at an angle from his original path. In less than an hour he was in a small grove of trees, surrounded on all sides by unusually large expanses of grass. On a smaller scale the grove was a duplicate of that fecund farm at the head of the Sweetwater, but the food plants showed less care and the grove had none of the parklike appearance of the larger village. Nor was there an arbour for a house. In the centre of the grove was an immense breshwahr, an old giant that would have measured twenty feet through its dead trunk. It was hollow near its base, partly through natural causes and partly through the efforts of thousands of wood-eating insects some long-dead Controller had set to eating the pulp for reasons their dim instinctual minds would never know or understand. A small
crack, barely large enough to admit him, opened from eight feet above the ground to its base.

Timmy stepped to the door, hesitated, and was met with a strong surge of
welcome-enter-warmth-joy-to-see-you
. He stepped inside, and saw the dying woman.

She might have been two hundred, but hardly more, and it was not age that brought death stealing upon her. Her body-hair was silver-tipped but still thick, the worn old body still strong.

“Greetings to you, young stranger named Timmy. Know that you look upon Shuhallah the Barren, wife of many men but mother of none. Aye, and had it not been for the latter perhaps there would have been but one of the former. And do not look so worried, or heart-broken. Death will not jump from me to you today, though it comes to all in time. And you guess rightly, I carry my own death inside me, bound, up in some cursed way I do not understand with the sickness that would let me conceive time and again, but bring nothing to fruition. Such has been my life, and gladly do I leave it behind me now. What brings you forth upon havasid?”

Her words were brave ones, but beneath them, so strongly present not even her magnificent control could entirely hide it, was a lurking fear.

“I go on havasid because my mind is worried, and I fear for my people. And already it is worthwhile, for I have found you. Tell me, how comes it that you possess such marvellous power of speech-through-thought?”

She chuckled slightly, and grimaced when the laughter brought her pain. “It has been so since I passed my initiation rites as a young woman, ten generations before you were born. All the people of my village rejoiced, for from my seed, and the seed of the best Controller in the village, would come children of marvellous and mighty powers. Aye, Naboli was a mighty Controller, and he took me as a mate though he yearned for the silky-haired Evishah, and when for the fourth time the child appeared before it should, and was dead as had been the rest, he went back to her. Yes, the silky-haired one waited, and in the end they found happiness, and I went on to my next husband. When that baby,
too, came early and dead the Head Councillor decreed that I must have as many babies by as many men as possible, in hopes that the gift I possessed might not die with me. Aye, over a span of many years, eight separate women watched with anguish in their eyes while their husbands came to my hut, and kept coming, until I conceived from each one. The babes came forth, and dead! dead! all dead, all dead. And then we knew beyond doubt that the fault was mine alone, and the people gave me peace. But no man would have the woman used by so many men, and I became a ward of the Chief, and resided in his house, and was as a second wife to him save that he would not touch me. But over the years the juices of life stirred in me again, my womb ached to be filled beyond all bearing, and one night when the Chief’s wife was sitting with a daughter giving birth I crept into his bed. He repulsed me, though with many kind words, and I walked forth into the night and never returned.”

She stopped, and Timmy, who had sunk into a crouch on the dirt floor, slowly straightened his legs and made himself more comfortable. The old woman’s tale was the most amazing he had ever heard, and he hardly knew whether to believe her or credit her ravings to the disorder of a mind approaching death. Infidelity was completely unknown to the Loafers, in fact impossible, since the emotions of the guilty parties could not be hidden from affected mates. But still, if the Head Councillor had been intent on preserving the precious gifts that belonged to this woman alone, perhaps he had been of such stern stuff that he had overruled the natural inclinations of his people, and their moral code as well, to ensure that she was fertilized by as many men as possible. And all of it, apparently, to no avail.

“Strange are the ways of life,” the old woman resumed, in a more gentle voice. “I came to these woods, many miles from my people, wanting nothing more than that my death should be quick and kind. But living in this old tree was a young man, an outcast like myself. He had failed the initiation rites, failed them three times in three different tribes, and after the third failure had gone forth into the wilderness to die. But life was strong, and though he was welcome nowhere he
found the food that keeps life in the body, and the water that quenches thirst. And when I came I provided the last great meaning of life, a woman of his own. True, I was old enough to be his mother, my firstborn would have been older than he had the babe lived, but what did it matter? We had only each other, and I treated him like a man and husband, not a boy, and he behaved towards me as a man to a wife young and virginal. I conceived again, and the baby came to full-term and was born alive, but died within minutes, of causes we could not understand. We buried it with great grief, and conceived another, and yet another, and still one more, before my worn body ceased to bloom and seed lay fallow in my womb. My young man grew old burying his babies, for all came forth full and whole, to die in his arms. Still, he did not leave me, for it was me he loved and not for the babies alone. No, a grogroc killed him one day when the great beast came upon him picking fruit from a tree the monster felt was his own. If only he had been even a little of a Controller—but then, if he had had any ability he would not have been lurking in this hollow tree when I came.”

Timmy felt the burn of tears in his eyes and angrily brushed them away. There were many tragedies on a world peopled by a primitive race who had the beginnings of a power they neither understood nor fully utilized. Why should he cry over this one?

The silence was broken by a gasp of pain from the old woman, and she reared half-upright on her bed of branches. Her body convulsed, grew rigid with pain, and her loud breathing was sharp and ragged. Timmy jumped to his feet and crossed the small room to her, but she motioned him back.

“No use, young man. I was born with this curse, and in the end it is killing me, as it should. I have wished for a death quick and kind, but Such is not my fate.” She was silent for a moment and her breathing eased, but as Timmy started to sit down again another attack started and her lean old body shook with spasms of pain.

Timmy stepped to the edge of the bed, knelt, took the old head into his arms and projected
peace-calm-ease-ease-ease
with all the power at his command. From somewhere he drew extra strength, so much of it that he penetrated her defences and reached the deeper areas of her consciousness. The pain went away, her breathing fell into a long shallow pattern, and the old heart eased to a slow, faltering beat.

She raised one thin, tired arm. “You are a very kind young man,” she whispered tautly, and caressed his cheek with fingers of bone.

He held her so, without moving, for another hour, and wept unashamedly, the tears running down his hairy cheeks in broken streams when the old woman died.

Timmy buried her beneath the dirt floor of the tree that had been the scene of her only happiness, and went on his way.

Two days hard walking brought him to her village.