Hiero Desteen (Omnibus) (55 page)

Growing in patches and sometimes even dense clumps about the bottom were living plants. They resembled nothing Hiero had ever seen or heard of before, but they seemed to come in several types. There was a maroon and purple thing, like a vast barrel, with long, pendulous fronds drooping from its top and trailing about on the ground below. Another type looked somewhat like a huge starfish, set atop a fleshy, brown stalk. This type grew in clumps, as if distorted and ragged umbrellas were somehow grouped in bunches. Smaller growths, as if of some bristling, spiked grasses of yellowish green, waist-high, sprang from patches of sand. Nowhere was there a hint of movement. Nor was there a sign of water. Save for the strange plants, the natural arena appeared as arid as the rock to which he clung.

But it was there! His trained body, sensitive to many influences unknown by his ancestors, could
feel
it. His whole system knew there was water somewhere down below. That it was out of sight meant nothing. It was there and it was close, drinkable, lifesaving water!

Once more he swept the pit with his eyes. Worn though he was, the savage training of the Abbey schools still governed him. If there was water here, and he knew there was, and if there was life, even so strange as these plants, then there was danger. In an oasis, near water holes, there lurked the hunters. He glared over the crater floor again, step by step, trying his best to see into the shadows, past the cave openings, and under the ledges. Nothing moved; the place might have been some strange sculpture, the dream of an unknown artist.

He could wait no longer. He moved over a bit to his right, where one of the broken slides of shale reached almost to the rim, and started slowly down it, never taking his vision from the silent pit. As he drew closer to the bottom, he searched even harder for some sign of life other than the enigmatic plants. Surely there must be insects, even in a place as bizarre as this? Yes, there was something! just below him rose a low mound, knee-high, with many small openings into and from which tiny things came and went on incomprehensible errands. The anthill gave him a sense of comfort, the first familiar sight from his own world he had seen since his escape. He watched, entranced, as a column of the little things marched by a few meters distant. He noticed that they seemed to have paths which avoided any of the vegetation by a wide margin, but his wits were now so dazed with tiredness that he simply recorded the fact without drawing any conclusions from it.

Then he drew some conclusions with great rapidity. The edge of the column overran an invisible barrier near one of the solitary purple barrels. The reaction was rapid. The nearest of the trailing fronds whipped up and down like a flail. The intrusive edge of the column was gone. The frond folded itself over, and Hiero saw that an opening had appeared in the top of the barrel plant. The opening
sucked,
as a child licks its fingers. Then the frond, now cleansed, drooped and once more lay idle and seemingly harmless on the white sand.

Hiero stared hard at the barrel. This one was small, not up to his knee; but farther out in the pit, there were some which towered over his head and were as thick around as an Abbey tun of wine. Once again he turned his gaze on the ants that continued on their business, apparently undisturbed. But he saw now that they avoided all the plants, no matter of what variety, not simply the purple barrels. No doubt they had reason.

He put one foot on the floor of the strange pit, then another. No plants were close. He turned around and then surveyed the place from the ground level. Down here, the heat was not so strong, the air ever so slightly damp.
Where is that damned water?

Even the mild blasphemy was enough to make him correct himself. He fell naturally into a kneeling position, arms outthrust, and let the spirit move him as it had in the past. His splayed arms pointed vaguely to the northeast. Rising slowly and carefully, he set out in that direction, carefully steering clear of any plants along the way.

Hiero limped and tottered on, some inner guide keeping him away from the vegetation. He had now reached the point of no return in terms of response, and his subconscious alone saw the quaver of the various things he came near. If a barrel plant shook as he approached or a clump of the spike grass wavered and leaned toward him, he saw it not. Along a mystic line of safety, he weaved between one danger and another, fell sidewise in one place, lurched back in another, but always kept to one direction.

In a moderately short time, he found himself under one of the overhanging cliffs he had noted from the rim. The heat, to a stranger, would have still been terrific. To him, fresh from the glow of the desert sun, it was like stepping out of a furnace into an ice palace. One moment he was in a place of raging heat; the next, he was shaded and cool. The light was dimmed and he found it hard to see. Above him, a great shelf of rock cut off the sunlight and most of the heat. He strove to peer ahead through the dimness and found himself on the edge of a still pool of clear water.

It reached as far as he could see to the left and right and back into the shadows before him. The smooth rock under his sandaled feet felt pleasantly cool. Without further ado, he collapsed on his face, falling with a splash across the margin of the pool.

Some vestige of the training he had spent his life receiving saved him from death. He took one gulp of the water, then turned on his back and allowed the coolness to soak into his skin. A man or woman of less iron will would have died on the spot, drinking to repletion. His background saved him. Something told him, even in extremity, that he was close to death, and he restrained his water-starved body. After a long while, he took another drink, less in size than the first, and after a longer period, another, this one less still. All the while he lay on the rock shelf, barely afloat.

The water tasted slightly acid, but was cool and pure. His body, trained in the detection and rejection of poisons, would have told him, had there been something wrong, even in the last extremity. It was simply water, filtered through strange rock perhaps, but nothing more. The delight of feeling it come through, or appearing to come through, his very skin held him in thrall. He floated in a sea of appreciation, reveling in the idea of wetness.

Eventually, after about the eighth cautious drink, sanity began to return. He suddenly saw the damp roof of the shelf above him and, with a great surge of emotion, realized that he was alive once more and that further plans could be made. Also, he felt a new want, one he had not permitted for a long time. He was hungry.

He took another drink, still measured. He did not want to become waterlogged.

He shot a glance at the roof of the stone above his head and another down at the pool on whose brink he had been lying. This must be a catchment basin, where the rare rains were collected and saved by nature, and where the whole ecosystem combined to create the oasis of the strange little pocket in which he found himself. Or into which he had stumbled. Or, said a side corner of his mind, into which he had been led. He examined this latter idea as calmly as he could and dismissed it. With the loss of his mental abilities, there had come a concomitant reliance on those of the body. He did not believe he could be led anywhere.

Eventually, he had absorbed all the water he could take and began to feel the first traces of a chill. This was enough warning, and he got out of the pool at once. Sitting on the bank—or rather, slope, for it was a very gentle gradient—he stared out at the rock-rimmed little valley which made up the pocket. Evening was coming, and he realized bemusedly that he had been lying in the shallows for most of the afternoon. The warmth of the sun was still strong, however, and he no longer felt any chill, despite the lengthening shadows.

As the dark of evening grew upon the landscape, he watched the strange plants of the crater; and now, refreshed and with his faculties alert, he saw other things. There was a delicate movement among the bushes, almost as if a breath of wind were moving them in the utterly windless air, and he watched them as they put themselves to sleep. The barrel plants tucked their long fronds tightly about themselves like ladies' cloaks, and the spike grasses withdrew into the ground, leaving only horny sheaths of dull brown on the surface, less than one-third of the original length. The starfish plants somehow withdrew into their own stalks, until nothing was left except a thing like a fat stump, devoid of adornment. The whole appearance of the little pocket changed, becoming even more still and silent.

As the long shadows crept across the basin floor before him, he continued watching, utterly motionless, but now from his belt he drew the narrow fragment of rock, hoarded since his descent from the crag far down the outer slope. His ears strained as the swift night of the desert fell like a mantle upon the crater. Soon he heard what he had been hoping to hear.

There were squeaks and scratching noises in the night. Hiero's eyes, trained to the dark, saw small shadows darting here and there across the sands. Close to the rock on which he crouched stood the cone-stump into which a starfish plant had withdrawn. Now something the size of a small dog, with stumpy legs and a dragging tail, waddled around the base of the plant and sat up on its rump. It began to gnaw the plant-thing, its teeth making a grinding noise. Hiero surmised that it would never have dared to do so in the light of day. At night, the metabolism of the plants forced them to withdraw in nocturnal hibernation. Then they could be made into victims.

The animal was hardly more than arm's length away and the priest struck like lightning. There was a crunch as the broad skull cracked, and the body fell before him, barely twitching. Holding it close, he gave it a careful examination. Despite the dim light, for the moon had not yet risen, he could see enough for his purpose.

The creature was not all that ill-looking, actually, though not much like anything he had seen before. In some ways, its pale-furred body rather resembled that of a squat rodent, and it had similar chisel teeth. Its round tail appeared overlong for its body, and he wondered if it might not be prehensile. There were no external ears, and its eyes were small and buried deep in the head.

It seemed clearly mammalian, and the blood which stained its fur smelled no more alien than his own. In short, it was food.

What followed would no doubt appall a person used to life under conditions of civilization. Hiero could either take or leave civilized habits; he had been raised on a frontier of strife and savage warfare, under conditions so bitter that only the toughest survived. When you were hungry, in his lexicon, you ate. What you ate and how depended on what was around. If you had no fire, you ate raw meat.

He got enough of the fur off with his stone pick to sink his strong teeth through the tough hide. It was not easy chewing, but he had eaten worse and no doubt would again, he thought to himself. After a dozen rending bites, he stopped long enough to say a rude grace, then went back to hacking and chewing once more. The stringy meat, rank and strong, went down with no particular difficulty. Any alien element, anything like a poison, would have caused him to regurgitate as soon as his body had detected it. There was nothing, though, and after a while his body felt replete. He wrapped the remnant of the carcass in the scraps of hide he had ripped off and looked about for shelter. He had drunk and he had eaten. Now his overtaxed frame needed rest more than anything else.

His eyes swept the sands and the hillocks of dormant vegetation which dotted the moonlit arena, becoming fixed on one spot off to the right. Several round holes, black circles in the paler rock of the wall, showed in the wan light. Small things still moved and rustled out on the floor of the pit. His killing of the hapless plant eater had passed unnoticed. No doubt other predators existed and fed at night also. He would have to be careful of them, as well. He rose quietly, holding the meat in one hand, his crude weapon poised in the other, and moved off toward the openings he had marked down. In forty meters, the water of the pool came to an end; at the same time, the roof of the vault which shielded it tapered back into the inner slope. He passed quietly out under the stars and the half circle of the risen moon. Still the small night sounds continued without a break around him. The oasis pursued the doubtless ancient tenor of its circumscribed life, unconscious that a new killer had come, one far more dangerous than any ever before encountered.

The killer himself felt weary, but also, despite his fatigue, he had a strange sense of peace. For the first time in days—was it only days?—he had lost the feeling of being hunted, of being the helpless prey of powers and enemies with whom he could not contend. Alone he had fought and conquered the demon of the dark; alone he had found water, food, and shelter. Alone he had survived. His God had not turned away His face, and Hiero was grateful and humble. But deep inside, he felt a thrill of pride. The Abbey training could not make a man, but it could find one; and having done so, it could teach him to help himself. That was what God wanted, as did the Church Universal—for men and women to help themselves, to struggle to the end, never to give up. It was a simple lesson and, like so many simple lessons, not really easy to learn.

He paused by the first of the openings and took a careful look at it. Too shallow, no more than a niche in the stone face. The next was barely a scrape, the third too narrow. The fourth opening, however, was something more useful. An entrance barely large enough to permit passage gave onto a rounded chamber, in which he could crouch or lie down, but was no larger than he needed. Further, a pile of rubble partially filled one end—dead sticks and small stones, with some ancient bone fragments. The place had doubtless been the lair of some creature before, but the former owner was long gone, and not even an odor remained. Hiero hastened to block the entrance with as much of the litter as he could sweep up, and soon only a small opening admitted the night air. The floor of the little cave was sand, and he saved some of the softer twigs and bark fragments, as they appeared to be, for a pillow. He dug holes for his hips and shoulders and curled up to get some badly needed rest. If some creature should menace him, he felt his senses were alert enough now to give him the instant's warning which could mean the difference between life and death. He could do no more.