Lewis & Glark | Time Traders | Book One | Chapter 8
Lewis wrapped the rope which had been meant to bring him down around Lal. He lashed the tribesman’s wrists tightly before he knelt to cut loose his fellow time traveler. Lal now huddled against the trunk of the willow tree, fear in every line of his small body. His apparent fear was so great that Lewis felt no satisfaction at turning the tables on him. Instead he felt increasingly uneasy.
“What’s’ this all about?” Lewis asked Maarn as he freed him and helped him up.
Maarn massaged his wrists, took a step or two, and grimaced with pain. “Our friend seeks to be an obedient servant of Lurgha,” he replied.
“The tribe is out to hunt us?” Lewis asked as he picked up his bow.
“Lurgha has issued an order,” Maarn explained. “Any traders who escaped are to be brought in and introduced to him personally at the sacrifice for the enrichment of the fields.”
The old, old gift of blood and life at the Spring sowing. Lewis recalled grisly details from his lessons at the base. Any wandering stranger or enemy tribesman taken in a raid before that day would meet such a fate. On unlucky years when people were not available a zebrelle or spider-wolf might serve. But the best sacrifice of all was a man, of any race. So Lurgha had decreed — from the air — that traders were to be the targets of such sacrifice?
“We have to move fast,” Lewis told Maarn as he took up the rope which made a leading cord for Lal. Glark would want to question the tribesman about this second order from Lurgha.
Impatient as Lewis was, he had to mend his pace to accommodate Maarn, who was close to the end of his strength. He had started off bravely enough, but now he wavered. Lewis sent the tethered Lal ahead with a sharp push, ordering him to stay in front, while he gave Maarn his shoulder to lean on.
It was well into the afternoon before they came up the stream and reached the cave. Glark, reclined on his bed of ferns, turned to face the group.
“Maarn! You are alive!” Glark hailed Lewis’ companion with more emotion than Lewis had ever seen from him. At the sight of Lal, Glark’s mood shifted. “And why are you here, Lal of Nodren’s town?”
“Mischief.” Lewis helped Maarn within the cave and to the pile of ferns which was his own bed. “He was hunting traders as a present for Lurgha.”
“And by whose word did you go hunting my kinsman, Lal?” Glark barked. “Was it Nodren’s? Has he forgotten the blood bond between us? For it was in the name of Lurgha himself that that bond was made — ”
“Aaaah — ” The tribesman squatted down dirt floor of the cave where Lewis had shoved him. His arms still tied in front of him by his wrists, he brought his face down toward the ground so that only his bald head was exposed. Lewis realized that the little man was now crying like a child, his hunched shoulders rising and falling with the force of his sobs. “Aaaah — ” he wailed.
Glark allowed him a moment or two of noisy grief and then stood up and limped over to grasp his chin and pull up his head. Lal’s eyes were screwed tightly shut, but there were tears on his cheeks, and his mouth twisted in another wail.
“Be quiet!” Glark shook him, but not too harshly. “Have you yet felt the bite of my sharp knife? Has an arrow holed your skin? You are alive, and you could be dead. Show that you are glad you live and continue to breathe, Lal, by telling us what you know.”
The woman Cassca had displayed a measure of intelligence and ease at their meeting upon the road. But it was very plain that Lal was of different stuff. A simple man in whose head few ideas could find shelter at one time. And to him the present was all black. Little by little, Glark and Lewis dragged the story out of him.
Lal was poor, so poor that he had never dared dream of owning for himself some of the precious things the traders displayed to the wealthy of Nodren’s town. But he was also a follower of Cassca and the Great Mother, rather than one who made sacrifices to Lurgha. Lurgha was the god for warriors and great men, a being too high to concern himself with a poor being such as Lal.
So when Nodren reported the destruction of Kali Outpost under the storm fist of Lurgha, Lal had been impressed only to a point. He was still convinced it was none of his concern, and instead he began thinking of the treasures which might lie hidden in the destroyed buildings. It occurred to him that Lurgha’s Wrath had been laid upon the men who had owned them, but perhaps it would not stretch to the fine things themselves. So Lal had gone secretly to the outpost to explore.
What he had seen there had utterly converted him to a belief in the fury of Lurgha and he had been frightened out of his simple mind, fleeing without making the search he had intended. But Lurgha had seen Lal there, had read his irreverent, selfish thoughts.
At that point Glark interrupted the stream of Lal’s story. How had Lurgha seen Lal?
Because — Lal shuddered, began to cry again, and spoke the next few sentences haltingly — that very morning when he had gone out to hunt wild fowl in the marshes, Lurgha had spoken to him.
And how had Lurgha spoken? Glark’s voice was softer, gentle.
Out of the air, Lal said, the same way Lurgha had spoken to Nodren, who was a chief. Lurgha said that he had seen Lal at the outpost, and so Lal was to be his sacrifice. But not yet would he finish him, not if Lal served him in other ways. And he, Lal, had lain flat on the ground before the bodiless voice of Lurgha and had sworn that he would serve Lurgha to the end of his life.
Then Lurgha had told him to hunt down one of the evil traders who was hiding in the marshes, and bind him with ropes. Then he was to call the men of the village and together they would carry the prisoner to the outpost where Lurgha had unleashed his wrath, and there they would leave him. Later they might return and take what they found there and use it to bless the fields at sowing time, and all would be well with Nodren’s village. And Lal had sworn that he would do Lurgha’s bidding. He was a man without hope, so the promise was his only path to continued life.
“Yet,” Glark said even more gently, “have you not served the Mother all these years, giving to her a portion of the first fruits even when the yield of your one field was small?”
Lal stared at him, his sorrowful face still smeared with tears. It took a second or two for the question to penetrate his fear-clouded mind. Then he nodded timidly.
“Has she not dealt with you well in return, Lal?” Glark continued. “You are a poor man, that is true. But you are not gaunt of belly, even though this is the thin season when men fast before the coming of the new harvest. The Great Mother watches over her own. And it is she who has brought you to us now. I say to you, Lal, and I, Assha of the traders, speak with a straight tongue. The Lurgha who struck our outpost, who spoke to you from the air, means you no good.”
“Aaaah!” wailed Lal. “Yes, Assha. He is of the blackness and the wandering spirits of the dark!”
“A true depiction from a wise man,” Glark replied, attempting to stoke some self-worth into Lal. “Lurgha is no kin to the Great Mother, for she is of the light and of good things, of the new grain, and the newborn lambs for your flocks, of the maidens and warriors who bring forth sons and daughters to lift their spears and sow their grains. Lurgha’s quarrel lies with us, Lal, not with Nodren nor with you. And we take upon us that quarrel.”
Glark limped from Lal’s side toward the entrance to the cave where the shadows of evening were beginning to creep across the ground.
“Hear me, Lurgha,” Glark called into the coming night, “I am Assha of the traders, and upon myself I take your hate. Not upon Lal, nor upon Nodren, nor upon the people who live in Nodren’s town, shall your wrath lie. Thus do I say it!”
Maarn and Lewis shared a glance. The slight grin on Maarn’s face let Lewis know that the show that Glark was putting on was solely for Lal.
Lewis then noticed that Glark concealed from Lal a wave of his hand. At that moment, a spectacular explosion of green fire erupted in the distance beyond the nearby stream. Lal cowered and wailed again. But when that fire was followed by no other displays, he again raised his head.
“You have seen how Lurgha answered me, Lal. Toward me only will his wrath be turned,” Glark declared. He limped back into the cave toward the darkness and dragged out the white spider-wolf skin, dropping it before Lal. “This you will give to Cassca that she may use it as a carpet for her altar to the Great Mother. See, it is white and so rare that both will be pleased with such a fine gift. And you will tell them all that has happened and how you believe in the Great Mother’s powers over the powers of Lurgha, and both will be well pleased with you. But you shall say nothing to the others of the village, for this quarrel is between Lurgha and Assha now, and not for the meddling of others.”
Glark untied the rope which bound Lal’s arms. Lal reached out a hand to the wolf skin, his eyes filled with wonder.
“This is a fine thing you give me, Assha,” Lal said. “Cassca and the Great Mother will be pleased. For in many years she has not had such a fine carpet for her altar. I am but a little man. The quarrels of great ones are not for me. Since Lurgha has accepted your words, this is none of my affair. Yet I will not go back to the village for a while — with your permission, Assha. For I am a man of loose and wagging tongue and oftentimes I speak what I do not really wish to say. So if I am asked questions, I answer. If I am not there to be asked such questions, I cannot answer.”
Maarn laughed, and Glark smiled. “Well enough, Lal,” Glark replied. “Perhaps you are a wiser man than you think. But also, I do not believe you should stay here.”
“To that I agree, Assha,” Lal replied, nodding. “You are now facing the Wrath of Lurgha, and with that I wish no part. Thus, I shall go back into the marsh for a while. There are birds and hares to hunt, and I shall work upon this fine skin so that when I take it to Cassca and the Great Mother, it shall indeed be a gift worth their smiles and praise. Now, Assha, I would go before the night comes, if it pleases you.”
“Go with good fortune, Lal,” Glark replied, a slight grimace on his face from being on his feet for so long.
Lal bowed down in a shy, awkward farewell to the three of them. He picked up the spider-wolf skin, flung it over his shoulder, and walked out of the cave. They watched him turn when he reached the stream and walk away out of sight.
“Will he squeal on us,” Maarn asked wearily. “Was it safe to let him go?”
“What would you do — keep him here?” Glark replied walking over and easing himself down onto his bed of ferns with a deep groan. “If we tried that, he’d scheme to escape and definitely try to turn the tables on us. Now he’ll keep away from Nodren’s village and out of sight for the time being. Lal’s not too bright in some ways, but he’s a good hunter. If he has reason for hiding out, it’ll take a better hunter to track him. At least we know now that the Ones are afraid they did not make a clean sweep here. What happened, Maarn?”
While Maarn was telling his story in more detail, Lewis attended to his cuts and burns, and gave him a pain capsule to make him comfortable. Lewis then lit the fire and prepared food for them — three crows and two hares.
“How did they spot the outpost?” Glark rubbed his chin and frowned at the fire.
“Only way I can guess is that they picked up our transmission signal and pinpointed the source,” Maarn replied. “That means they must have been hunting us for some time.”
“No curious or suspicious traders about lately?” Glark asked.
Maarn shook his head. “I don’t think our cover was blown that way. Harth was a pro. If I didn’t know him, I would have sworn he was born one of the Boreal folk. He had a network of informants running all the way from here to the Southern coast. Amazing how he was able to work without arousing any suspicions. I suppose his being a member of the smiths’ guild was a big help. He could pick up a lot of news from any village where there was one at work. And there wasn’t a whisper of trouble across the entire continent, as far as I could tell. We were already sure that this part of the continent, and the territories further South across the channel, were clean before we ever took cover as Boreal.”
Glark chewed a broiled crowing reflectively. “Their permanent transport base has to be somewhere within the bounds of the territory they hold in our own time.”
“They could plant it high on the Northern continent and laugh at us,” Maarn suggested. “Little hope of our getting there in this window of time.”
“No.” Glark threw the stripped bone into the fire and licked grease from his fingers. “Then they would be faced with the old problem of distance. If what they are exploiting, our objective, lay within their modern boundaries, we would never have stumbled onto the thing in the first place. What the Ones want must lie outside their modern holdings, a slender point in our favor. Therefore they will plant their transport point as close to it as they can. Our transportation problem is more difficult than theirs will ever be.”
Maarn chewed on a bite of hare and nodded in agreement.
“You know why we chose the arctic for our base,” Glark continued. “It lies in a section of the world never populated by other than roving hunters. But I’ll bet anything that their transport point is somewhere on this continent, where they have people to contend with. If they are using a plane, or ship, they can’t risk its being seen.”
“I don’t see why not,” Lewis broke in. “The natives here would either think that Lurgha’s bird was some kind of seasonal magic — or a flying vessel from some planetary trade partner that they just haven’t seen before.”
Glark shook his head. “The Ones must have the interference-with-history worry as much as we have. Anything beyond the basic off-planet technologies of this time has to be hidden or disguised in such a way that the native who may stumble upon it will never know it is man-made. Our sub is a whale to all appearances. Possibly their flying vessel appears to be a bird. But neither can bear too close an examination. We don’t know what could result from a leak of real technological knowledge in this or any primitive time, how it might change history.”
Lewis advanced what he believed to be the best argument against that reasoning. “But suppose I handed Lal a laser gun and taught him to use it. He couldn’t duplicate the weapon — the technology required lies so far beyond this age. These people couldn’t reproduce such a thing.”
“True enough,” Glark replied. “On the other hand, don’t downplay the ingenuity of the smiths or the native intelligence of men in any era. These tribesmen might not be able to reproduce your laser gun, but it would set them thinking along new lines. We might find that over the course of a generation or two, they would think our time right out of being.”
There was a long silence as Maarn and Lewis both took in the power of that concept, took the last bites of their meal and reclined on their ferns.
“No, we dare not meddle with the past,” Glark proclaimed. “This is the same situation we faced in our time immediately after the discovery of the most recent AI neuro-bomb. Everybody raced to produce that new weapon and then sat around and shivered for fear we’d be crazy enough to use it on each other. The Ones have made new discoveries which we have to match, or we will be destroyed. But in this time and earlier, we have to be extremely careful — both us and the Ones — or perhaps destroy the world as we know it in our time.”
“What do we do now?” Maarn wanted to know.
“Harth and I came here only for a trial run,” Glark replied. “It’s his test. The whale is to return about nine days from now.”
“So we sit tight, if we can, and we wait for the whale,” Maarn suggested. “Meanwhile we have nine days.”
They spent three more days in the cave. Maarn was on his feet and impatient to leave before Glark was able to hobble well enough to travel. Though Lewis and Maarn took turns at hunting and guard duty, they saw no signs that the tribesmen were tracking them. Apparently Lal had done as he promised, withdrawing to the marsh and hiding there apart from his people.
In the gray of pre-dawn on the fourth day Glark wakened Lewis. Their fire had been buried with earth, and already the cave seemed bleak. They ate venison roasted the night before, that Maarn had hunted, and went out into the chill of a fog. A little way down the valley, Maarn joined them out of the mist from his camouflaged guard post. Keeping their pace to one which favored Glark’s healing wound, they made their way inland in the direction of the track linking the villages.
Crossing that road they continued North, the land beginning to rise under them. Far away they heard the blatting of sheep, the bark of a dog. In the fog, Lewis stumbled in a shallow ditch beyond which lay a stubbled field. Glark paused to look about him, his nostrils expanding as if he were a hound smelling out their trail.
The three went on, crossing a whole series of small, irregular fields. Lewis was sure that the yield from any of these cleared strips must be scanty. The fog was thickening. Glark pressed the pace, using his handmade crutch carefully. He gave an audible sigh of relief when they were faced at last by two stone monoliths rising like pillars. A third stone lay across the top of them, forming a crude arch through which they saw a narrow valley running back into the hills.
Through the fog, Lewis could sense the eerie strangeness of the valley beyond the massive gate. He would have said that he was not superstitious, that he had merely studied these tribal beliefs as lessons — he had not accepted them. Yet now, if he had been alone, he would have avoided that place. He was sure that what waited within was not for him.
To his secret relief Glark paused by the arch to wait.
Glark gestured the other two into cover. Lewis obeyed willingly, though the dank drops of condensing fog dripped on his cloak and wet his face as he brushed against prickly-leafed shrubs. Here were walls of evergreen plants and dwarfed pines almost as if this tunnel of year-round greenery had been planted with some purpose in mind.
Once Lewis and Maarn had concealed themselves, Glark called, shrill but sweetly, with a bird’s rising notes. Three times he made that sound before a figure moved in the fog, the rough gray-white of its long cloak melting in the wisps of mist.
Out of the heart of the valley, a figure came, concealed by a flowing cloak. They halted right on the other side of the arch and Glark, making a gesture to the others to stay where they were, faced the muffled stranger.
“Hands and feet of the Mother, she who sows what may be reaped,” Glark proclaimed.
“Outland stranger who is under the Wrath of Lurgha,” the figure mocked him in the voice of Cassca. “What do you want, outlander, that you dare to come here where no man may enter?”
“That which you know,” Glark replied. “For on the night when Lurgha came, you also saw — ”
Lewis heard the hiss of a sharply drawn breath.
“How know you that, outlander?” the figure inquired.
“Because you serve the Mother and you are jealous for her and her service,” Glark said. “If Lurgha is a mighty god, you wanted to see his acts with your own eyes.”
When Cassca finally answered, there was anger and frustration in her voice. “And you know of my shame then, Assha. For Lurgha came on a bird, and he did as he said he would. So now the village will make offerings to Lurgha and beg his favor, and the Great Mother will no more have those to harken to her words and offer her the first fruits — ”
“But from where came this bird on which was Lurgha, can you tell me that?” Glark asked.
“What difference does it make from what direction Lurgha came?” Cassca replied. “That does not add nor take from his power.” Cassca moved beneath the arch. “Or does it in some strange way, Assha?”
“Perhaps it does,” Glark suggested. “Please tell me.”
“From that way he came, Assha,” Cassca replied, turning slowly and pointing over her right shoulder. “I watched, knowing that I was a servant of the Mother and that even Lurgha’s thunderbolts could not hurt me. Does knowing that make Lurgha smaller in your eyes, Assha? When he has destroyed all that is yours and your kin with it?”
“Perhaps,” Glark replied. “I do not think Lurgha will come again.”
She shrugged, and the heavy cloak flapped. “We shall see, Assha. Now go away from this valley that is no place for common men.”
Cassca turned and paced back toward the heart of the valley.
Lewis and Maarn emerged from the bushes.
“Northeast,” Maarn said pointing in the direction to which Cassca had gestured.
Without further discussion, Lewis and Maarn followed Glark, who walked to the edge of the valley and up out of its blanket of cool fog into the brightness of the mid-day sun.
© 2024 Zen Brazen — All rights reserved
Based on Andre Norton’s Time Traders (public domain)
