Lewis & Glark | Time Traders | Book One | Chapter 10
“Not to be too hopeful,” Maarn rubbed his arm across his hot face, “but so far, so good.”
After casting aside some of the branches Lewis had lopped from the trees they had been felling, he went to help Maarn roll another small log up to a shelter which was no longer temporary. If there had been any eyes other than the woodland hunters’ to spy on them, they would have seen only the usual procedure of the Boreal traders, busily constructing one of their posts.
That they were being watched by the hunters, all three were certain. That there might be other spies in the forest, they had to assume for their own safety. They might prowl at night, but in the daytime all of the time agents kept within the bounds of the roles they were acting.
Barter with the heads of the hunting tribe had brought those shy people into their camp, a camp of the strangers who had such wonders to exchange for tanned deer hides and better furs. The news of the traders’ arrival spread quickly during the short time they had been here, so that two other clans had sent members to watch the proceedings.
With the trade came news which the agents sifted and studied. Each of them had a list of questions to insert into their conversations with the tribesmen if and when that was possible. Although they didn’t share a common speech with the tribesmen, hand and physical gestures were informative and certain nouns could be quickly learned. In the meantime, Glark became friendly with the nearest and first of the clan groups they discovered, going hunting with the men as an excuse to penetrate the unknown section they must familiarize themselves with in their search for the One base.
Lewis drank river water from a leather bucket and mopped his own hot face. The sun had just set, but it was still warm under the breezeless canopy of the forest. They would soon need a fire, but a short rest was in order, after a long day of physical activities.
“If the Ones aren’t traders,” he mused aloud, “what is their cover?”
Maarn shrugged. “A hunting tribe? Fishermen?”
“These tribes are so familial,” Lewis replied. “Where would they get the women and children?”
“The same way they get their men,” Maarn suggested. “Recruit them in our own time. Or in the way lots of tribes grew during periods of stress.”
“You mean, kill off the men, take over their families?” Lewis supposed. This cold-bloodedness he found sickening. Although he had always prided himself on his toughness, several times during his training at the project he had been confronted by things which shook his belief in his own strong stomach and nerve.
“It has been done,” Maarn remarked bleakly, “hundreds of times by invaders. In these circumstances — with small family clans, widely scattered — it would be very easy.”
“Seems like they would have to pose as farmers, not roving hunters,” Lewis pointed out. “They couldn’t move a base around with them.”
“Right, a farming village would make sense,” Maarn replied. “But there isn’t any village like that around here. Yet they are here somewhere. Maybe underground?”
How right their guesses were they learned that night when Glark returned, a zebrelle carcass on his shoulder. Lewis knew him well enough by now to sense his preoccupation.
“You found something?” Lewis asked.
“A new set of ghosts,” Glark replied with a strange little smile.
“Ghosts!” Maarn pounced upon that. “The Ones like to play the supernatural angle, don’t they? First the voice of Lurgha and now ghosts. What do these ghosts do?”
“They inhabit a bit of mountainous territory Southeast of here,” Glark replied, pushing the zebrelle carcass off onto the ground. “A stretch strictly taboo for all hunters. We were following a bison track until the beast headed for what the tribesmen call the ‘ghost country’. Then, Ulffa called us off in a hurry. It seems that the hunter who goes in there after his quarry never reappears. Or if he does, it’s in a damaged condition, tormented by the ghosts and burned to death.”
Glark sat down by the fire and stretched his arms wearily. “A little more disturbing for us,” he continued. “A Boreal camp about twenty miles south of here, as far as I can judge, was exterminated just a week ago. The message was passed to me because I was thought to be a kinsman of the slain.”
“A whole camp of people exterminated — because they were hunting us?” Maarn asked.
“Possible,” Glark replied. “On the other hand, the action may have been just one of general precaution.”
“So, do the tribesmen think the ghosts did it?” Lewis wanted to know.
“I asked that,” said Glark. “No, it seems that strange, unfamiliar tribesmen overran the camp at night.”
“At night?” Maarn barked.
“Yes.” Glark’s tone was dry. “The tribes do not fight that way. Either someone slipped up in his briefing, or the Ones are overconfident and don’t care about the established rules. But it was the work of fellow tribesmen, or their counterfeits. There is also a nasty rumor spreading that the ghosts do not relish traders and that they might protest intrusions of such with penalties all around.”
“Like the Wrath of Lurgha,” offered Lewis.
“There is a certain repetition in this which suggests a lot to the suspicious mind,” Glark agreed.
“I’d say no more hunting expeditions for the present,” Maarn said. “It is too easy to mistake a friend for a deer and weep over his grave afterward.”
“That very thought entered my mind several times this afternoon,” Glark agreed. “These people are deceptively simple on the surface, but their minds do not work along the same patterns as ours. We try to outwit them, but it takes only one slip to make it fatal. In the meantime, I think we’d better make this place a little more snug. And it might be well to post sentries as unobtrusively as possible.”
“How about faking some signs of a ruined camp and becoming scarce ourselves?” Maarn suggested. “We could head for the ghost mountains, traveling by night, and Ulffa’s tribesmen would think we were finished off.”
“An idea to keep in mind,” Glark replied. “The point against it would be the missing bodies. It seems that the tribesmen who raided the Boreal camp left some very distasteful evidence of what happened to the camp’s inhabitants. And those we can’t produce to cover our trail.”
Maarn was not yet convinced. “We might be able to fake something along that line, too — ”
“We may not have to fake anything,” Lewis cut in softly. He was standing close to the edge of the clearing where they were building their hut, his hand on one of the posts of the small fence they had set up that day. His demeanor and expression brought Glark quickly to his side.
“What is it?” Glark asked.
Lewis’ hours of listening to the sounds of the wilderness made clear what was normal for this place, and what wasn’t.
“That bird,” Lewis said, nodding his head slightly to one side. “The blue one we’ve only seen fishing for frogs along the river. It has never called from inland, away from the water before.”
Glark, not even glancing in the direction of the bird, went for the water jug.
“Get your gear,” he ordered.
Their leather pouches, which held enough natural and protein rations to keep them alive for weeks were always at hand. Maarn gathered them from their half-finished cabin.
Again the bird called, its cry piercing and covering a long distance. Lewis could understand why a man would select it for the signal. He shadowed Glark who moved toward the edge of their clearing. Maarn, his cloak slung about him to conceal the ration bags, picked up the leather bucket as if he were merely going down to the river for water, and came to join Lewis and Glark.
They believed that they were carrying it off well, that the camp must appear normal to any lurkers in the woods. But either they had made some slip or the enemy was impatient. An arrow sped out of the night, and Glark escaped death only because he had leaned forward to reach for some kindling for the fire he was about to make. He dropped to the ground and rolled toward the brush at the edge of the clearing.
Lewis plunged for the brush in the opposite direction, as did Maarn. Lying flat on the ground, they started to work their way to the river bank where the open area would make surprise less possible.
“Glark?” Lewis whispered, looking backward.
“He’ll make his way toward the river when he can,” Maarn replied quietly.
They made slow progress, twice lying in the tall grass daggers in hand, while they listened to a faint rustle which betrayed the passing of one of the attackers. Both times Lewis was tempted to rise up and attack the stranger, but he fought down the impulse. He had learned a control of himself that would have been impossible for him a few months earlier.
The glimmer of the river was pale through huge clumps of grass. In this country, winter still clung tenaciously in shadowy places with clumps of leftover snow. Despite the heat during the day, there was a cool bite in the wind and water.
Lewis rose to his knees with an involuntary gasp as a scream cut through the night. He looked back toward the camp, only to feel Maarn’s hand clamp on his forearm.
“Come on, let’s go down to that shallow part we discovered!” Maarn implored.
They turned south, daring now to trot, half bent to the ground. The river was swollen with spring floods which were only now beginning to subside. Two days earlier they had noticed a sandbar at one spot. By crossing that shelf across the bed, they might hope to put water between them and the unknown enemy tonight. It would give them some breathing room, even though Lewis privately shrank from the thought of plowing into the stream. He had seen good-sized trees swirling along in the current only yesterday. And to make such a dash in the dark was risky.
They worked their way along the edge of the water with continued care, until they came upon Glark at last, so much a part of his background that Lewis started when the lump he had taken for a bush hunched forward to join them. They exchanged relieved glances and pats on the back, but kept quiet.
Together they made it to the shallow sandbar, crossed and turned south again to head for the mountains. It was then that disaster struck.
Lewis heard no birdcall warning this time. Though he was on guard, he never sensed the approach of the tribesman who struck him down from behind. One moment he had been trailing Glark and Maarn — the next moment was black nothingness.
He was aware of a throb of pain which throbbed through his body and head. Forcing open his eyes, the dazzle of light was like a spear point striking directly into his brain, an agonizing pain. He closed his eyes, brought his hand up to his face and felt stickiness.
“Assha — ” He believed he called that aloud, but he didn’t even hear his own voice.
Lewis forced his eyes open once more, enduring the pain he recognized as sunshine. He turned his head to avoid the glare. It was hard to focus, but he fought to steady himself. There was some reason why it was necessary to move, to get away. But away from what and where? When Lewis tried to think he could only see muddled images which had no connection.
Then a moving object crossed his very narrow field of vision, passing between him and a thing he knew was a tree trunk. A four-footed creature with a red tongue hanging from its jaws. It came toward him stiff-legged, growling low in its throat, and sniffed at his body before barking in short excited bursts of sound.
The noise hurt his head so much that Lewis closed his eyes. Then a shock of icy liquid thrown into his face aroused him to make a feeble protest and he saw, hanging over him in a strange upside-down way, a bearded face which he knew from the past.
Hands were laid on him and the roughness with which he was moved sent Lewis spiraling back into the dark once again. When he aroused for the second time it was night and the pain in his head was dulled. He put out his hands and discovered that he lay on a pile of fur robes, and was covered by one.
“Assha — ” Again he tried that name. But it was not Assha who came in answer to his feeble call. The young woman who knelt beside him with a horn cup in her hand had neatly braided hair that shown golden by firelight. Lewis knew he had seen her before, but again where and when eluded him. She slipped a sturdy arm under his head and raised him while the world whirled about. The edge of the horn cup was pressed to his lips, and he drank bitter stuff which burned in his throat and lit a fire in his insides.
Then he was left to himself once again. In spite of his pain and bewilderment, he slept.
How many days Lewis lay in the camp of Ulffa, tended by the chief’s daughter, he found it hard to tell. It was Agga who had argued with her father and the tribe into caring for a man they believed almost dead when they found him, and who nursed Lewis back to life with knowledge acquired through many exchanges between the older wise women who were the doctors and priestesses of these roaming peoples.
Why Agga had bothered with the injured stranger at all Lewis learned when he was able to sit up and gather his bewildered thoughts into some sort of order. The chief’s daughter thirsted for knowledge. That same urge which had led her to certain experiments with herbs, had made her consider Lewis a challenge to her healing skill. When she knew that he would live, she was determined to learn from him all he had to give.
She also looked at Lewis with a look that no one else in the tribe offered him. He recognized the look, one that many girls had given him back in primary school, before he had dropped out. A look Joven had given him a couple times back at the base.
Agga used knowledge as the outward reason to nurse him back to health. But her ulterior motive was evident to Lewis.
Ulffa and the men of the tribe might have eyed the metal weapons of the traders with awe and avid desire. But Agga wanted more than trade goods. She wanted the secret of the making of such cloth as the strangers wore, everything she could learn of their lives and the lands through which they had come.
“A whale?” Agga had said with a slight look of disbelief on her face, at the tail end of a conversation one night.
“Yes,” Lewis replied. “We rode for three days on its back.” He tried his best to not ramble and talk in coherent words and sentences. But sometimes it was hard to tell if what he said made sense.
“How did you not fall off, when you were sleeping?” Agga pressed.
Lewis knew that he couldn’t divulge the details of the advanced anchors and materials they had used to keep from falling off the whale while they slept. He was still in a daze, but had the sense to be careful with his words, and not say anything that would make Agga suspicious.
“One night, we were surrounded by a school of lumen fish,” Lewis said, changing the subject. “They lit up the water all around us. It was beautiful. You would have loved it.”
The comment snapped Agga out of interrogation mode, and she delighted in Lewis’ attention, and his basic but compelling descriptions of his travels and adventures.
Over some number of days, Agga confronted Lewis with endless questions which he answered as best he could, as he lay in an odd, dreamy state where only the present had any reality. The past was dim and far away. While he was now and then dimly aware that he had something to do, he forgot it easily.
The chief and his men prowled the half-built station after the attackers had withdrawn, bringing back with them a handful of loot — a bronze razor, two skinning knives, some fishhooks, and a length of cloth which Agga took. Lewis eyed their loot indifferently, making no claim on it. His interest in everything around him was often blanked out by headaches which kept him limp on his bed, uncaring and stupid for hours or even full days.
He gathered that the tribe had been living in fear of an attack from the same raiders who had wiped out the trading post. But finally, their scouts returned with the information that the enemy had gone South.
There was one change of which Lewis was not aware, but which might have startled both Glark and Maarn. Lewis Freeman had indeed died under that blow which had left him unconscious beside the river. The young man whom Agga had nursed back to sense and a slow recovery was Lew of the Boreal people. This same Lew nursed a hot desire for vengeance against those who had struck him down and captured his kinsmen, a feeling which the family tribe who had rescued him could well understand.
This urgency was pushing him to try his strength now, to keep to his feet even when they were unsteady. His bow was gone, but Lewis spent hours fashioning another, when Agga was tending to other chores of the camp.
When he was finally back on his feet, Lewis traded his copper bracelet for the best dozen arrows in Ulffa’s camp. He presented one of his bone and bead necklaces to Agga with all his gratitude. While the necklace was only part of his Boreal costume, he had made up a story about its origin and meaning to him that made covet the object even more.
Now that his strength was coming back, Lewis could not rest easy in the camp. He was ready to leave, even though the gashes on his head were still tender to the touch. Ulffa indulgently planned a hunt to the South, and Lew took the trail with the tribesmen.
He casually shuffled toward the back of the hunting party, and successfully ditched them when they turned aside at the beginning of the taboo land of the ghosts.
Lewis, his own mind submerged and taken over by his Boreal cover, hesitated there, crouched in the bushes. Tormented by more than the headaches which still came and went with painful regularity, he wished that he could just lay down and sleep. But he could not give up now. He needed to find Glark and Maarn. He needed to enact vengeance on those that had attacked him.
But what he sought was ahead in the mountains, an obsessive thought consumed his mind. But the mountains were taboo and he should not venture into them.
How long he might have hesitated there if he had not come upon the trail, Lewis didn’t know. But on the day after he ditched Ulffa and the hunters, a glint of sunlight striking between two trees pointed out a woodsman’s mark on a nearby tree trunk. The two halves of Lewis’s memory clicked together for an instant as he examined the cut. He knew that it marked a path and he pushed on, hunting a second cut and then a third. Convinced that these would lead him into the unknown territory, Lewis’ desire to explore overcame any notions of superstitions and ghosts.
There were other signs that this was an often-traveled route. A spring cleared of leaves and walled with stone, a couple of steps cut in the turf on a steep slope. Lewis moved warily, alert to any sound. He might not be an expert woodsman, but he was learning fast, perhaps the faster because his false memories now supplanted the real ones.
That night, he built no fire, crawling instead into the heart of a rotted log to sleep. He awakened once to the call of a spider-wolf and another time at the distant crash of a dead tree yielding to wind.
In the morning, he was about to venture back to the trail he had left the night before when he saw five bearded, fur-clad men looking much the same as Ulffa’s people. Lewis hugged the earth and watched them pass out of sight before he followed.
All that day, he wove an up-and-down trail behind the small group, sometimes catching sight of them as they topped a rise well ahead or stopped to eat. It was late afternoon when he crept cautiously to the top of a ridge and gazed down into a valley.
There was a town in that valley, sturdy houses of logs behind a stockade. He had seen towns vaguely like it before, in his training streams. But this place had a dreamlike quality, as if it were not as real as it appeared.
Lewis rested his chin on his arms and watched that town and the people moving in it. Some were fur-clad hunters, but others dressed quite differently. His head lifted at the sight of one of the men who had walked so swiftly from one house to the next. He looked like a Boreal trader!
His unease grew stronger with every moment he watched. But it was the oddness he sensed in that town which bothered him and not any warning that he, himself, was in danger.
He had gotten to his knees to see better when out of nowhere, a rope sang through the air, settling about his chest with a vicious jerk which not only drove the air from his lungs but pulled him down to the ground, his arms tied tightly to his body.
© 2024 Zen Brazen — All rights reserved
Based on Andre Norton’s Time Traders (public domain)
