A Heritage of Stars (15 page)

Cushing shook his head. “Someone would get hurt.”

Elayne rose to her feet. Her voice came to them, calm, unhurried, so precise it hurt. “You are wrong,” she said to the wardens. “The things you have been telling us have no truth in them. There are no Sleepers and no danger. We are going on.”

With that, she walked toward them, slowly, deliberately, as if there were no one there to stop her. Meg rose swiftly, clutching at her arm, but Elayne shook off the hand. Ezra came quickly to his feet and hurried to catch up with Elayne. Andy flicked his tail and followed close behind.

The wardens sprang up quickly and began to back away, their eyes fastened on the terrible gentleness of Elayne's face.

From off to one side came a coughing roar and Cushing spun around to face in its direction. A huge animal, gray and brown, humped of shoulder, great mouth open in its roar, had burst from a clump of plum bushes that grew beside the gully and was charging the wardens' huddled horses. The horses, for an instant, stood frozen in their fear, then suddenly reacted, plunging in great arcing leaps to escape the charging bear.

Rollo catapulted into action, at full speed with his second stride; his spear, held two-handed, extended straight before him.

“A grizzly!” he shouted. “After all this time, a grizzly!”

“Come back, you fool,” yelled Cushing, reaching for an arrow and nocking it to the bowstring.

The horses were running wildly. Straight behind them came the bear, screaming in his rage, rapidly closing on the frightened animals. Running directly at the bear was Rollo, with leveled spear thrusting out toward it.

Cushing raised the bow and drew back the arrow, almost to his cheek. He let it go and the arrow was a whicker in the golden sunshine of late afternoon. It struck the bear in the neck and the bear whirled, roaring horribly. Cushing reached for another arrow. As he raised the bow again, he saw the bear, rearing on its hind legs, its face a foaming frenzy, its forelegs lifted to strike down, with Rollo almost underneath them, the spear thrusting up to strike. Out of the tail of his eye, Cushing saw Andy, head stretched forward, ears laid back, tail streaming out behind him, charging down at full gallop upon the embattled bear.

Cushing let the arrow go and heard the thud, saw its feathered end protruding from the bear's chest, just below the neck. Then the bear was coming down, its forearms reaching out to grasp Rollo in their clutches, but with Rollo's spear now buried deeply in its chest. Andy spun on his front legs, his hind legs lashing out. They caught the bear's belly with a sickening, squashy sound.

The bear was down and Rollo was scrambling out from underneath it, the bright metal of his body smeared with blood. Andy kicked the bear again, then trotted off, prancing, his neck bowed in pride. Rollo danced a wild war jig around the fallen bear, whooping as he danced.

“Grease!” he was yelling. “Grease, grease, grease!”

The bear kicked and thrashed in reflex action. The wardens' horses were rapidly diminishing dots on the prairie to the south. The wardens, running desperately behind them, were slightly larger dots.

“Laddie boy,” Meg said, watching them, “I would say this broke up the parley.”

“Now,” said Elayne, “we'll go on to the butte.”

“No,” said Cushing. “First we render out some oil for Rollo.”

17

As the wardens had said, the living rocks were waiting for them, just outside the Trees. There were dozens of them, with others coming up from either side, rolling sedately, with a flowing, effortless, apparently controlled motion, moving for a time, then stopping, then rolling once again. They were dark of color, some of them entirely black, and they measured—or at least the most of them measured—up to three feet in diameter. They did not form a line in front of the travelers, to block their way, but moved out, to range themselves around them, closing to the back of them and to each side, as if they were intent upon herding them toward the Trees.

Meg moved close to Cushing. He put his hand upon her arm and found that she was shivering. “Laddie buck,” she said, “I feel the coldness once again, the great uncaring. Like the time we found the rock on the first night out.”

“It'll be all right,” he said, “if we can make our way through the Trees. The rocks seem to want us to move in toward the Trees.”

“But the wardens said the Trees would not let us through.”

“The wardens,” he said, “are acting out an old tradition that may not have any meaning now or may never have had a meaning, something that they clung to through the centuries because it was the one reality they had, the one thing in which they could believe. It gave them a sense of continuity, a belonging to the ancient past. It was something that set them apart as special people and made them important.”

“And yet,” said Meg, “when the bear stampeded the horses, they left us and went streaking after them, and they've not been back.”

“I think it was Elayne,” said Cushing. “Did you see their faces when they looked at her? They were terrified. The bear, running off the horses, took them off a psychological hook and gave them an excuse to get out of there.”

“Maybe, too,” said Meg, “it was being without horses. To the people of the plains, a horse is an important thing. They're crippled without horses. Horses are a part of them. So important that they had to run after them, no matter what.”

The Trees loomed before them, a solid wall of greenery, with the greenery extending down to the very ground. They had the look of a gigantic hedge. There was an ordinary look about them, like any other tree, but Cushing found himself unable to identify them. They were hardwoods, but they were neither oak nor maple, elm nor hickory. They were not exactly like any other tree. Their leaves, stirring in the breeze, danced and talked the language of all trees, although, listening to them, Cushing gained the impression they were saying something, that if his ears had been sharp enough and attuned to the talk that they were making, he could understand the words.

Shivering Snake, positioned in a halo just above Rollo's head, was spinning so fast that in one's imagination one could hear it whistle with its speed. The Followers had come in closer, smudged shadows that dogged their heels, as if they might be staying close to seek protection.

Ezra had halted not more than ten feet from the green hedge of the Trees and had gone into his formal stance, standing rigidly, with his arms folded across his chest, his head thrown back, his eyes closed. Slightly behind him and to one side, Elayne had flopped down to the ground, feet tucked beneath her, hands folded in her lap, and bowed, with the ragged elkskin pulled up to cover her.

Now there was a new sound, a faint clicking that seemed to come from back of them, and when Cushing turned to see what it might be, he saw it was the rocks. They had joined in a semicircular formation, extending from the forefront of the Trees on one hand, around an arc to the forefront of the Trees on the other hand, spaced equidistantly from one another, no more than a foot or so apart, forming an almost solid line of rocks, hemming in the travelers, holding them in place. The clicking, he saw, resulted when the rocks, each one standing in its place, but each one rocking slightly, first to one side, then the other, struck against the neighbors next in line.

“It's horrible,” said Meg. “That coldness—it is freezing me.”

The tableau held. Ezra stood rigid; Elayne sat unmoving; Andy switched a nervous tail. The Followers came in closer, now actually among them, blobs of shadows that seemed to merge with the others huddled there. Shivering Snake outdid itself in its frantic spinning.

Rollo said, softly, “We are not alone. Look back of us.”

Cushing and Meg twisted around to look. Half a mile away, five horsemen sat their mounts, graven against the skyline.

“The wardens,” said Meg. “What are they doing here?”

As she spoke, the wardens raised a wail, a lonesome, forsaken lament, a thin keening in which was written an ultimate despair.

“My God, laddie boy,” said Meg, “will there never be an end to it?”

And, saying that, she deliberately strode forward until she stood beside Ezra, raising her arms in a supplicating pose.

“In the name of all that's merciful,” she cried, “let us in! Please, do let us in!”

The Trees seemed to come alive. They stirred, their branches rustling and moving to one side to form a doorway so the travelers could come in.

They walked into a place where lay a templed hush, a place from which the rest of the world seemed forever sealed. Here was no low-hanging greenery but a dark and empty vastness that rose up above them, a vastness supported by enormous tree boles that went up and up into the dimness, like clean churchly pillars that soared into the upper reaches of a sainted edifice. Beneath their feet was the carpetlike duff of a forest floor—the cast-off debris that had fallen through the centuries and lain undisturbed. Behind them the opening closed, the outer greenery falling into place.

They halted, standing in the silence that they discovered was really not a silence. From far above came the soughing of trees put in motion by the wind, but, strangely, the soughing did no more than emphasize the basic hush that held here in the dimness.

Well, we made it, Cushing thought to say, but the deep hush and the dimness strangled him and no words came out. Here was not a place where one engaged in idle conversation. Here was something that he had not bargained for, that he had never dreamed. He'd set out on a forthright quest for a Place of Going to the Stars, and even in those times when he could bring himself to think that he had a chance of finding it, he had thought of it as being a quite ordinary installation from which men had launched their great ships into space. But the Trees and the living rocks, even the wardens, had about them a touch of fantasy that did not square with the place he had sought to find. And if this butte was, in all reality, the Place of Going to the Stars, what the hell had happened?

Ezra was on his knees and his lips were moving, but the words he spoke, if he was speaking words, were mumbled.

“Ezra,” Cushing asked sharply, “what is going on?”

Elayne was not sitting with her grandfather, as had been her habit, but was standing over him. Now she turned to Cushing. “Leave him alone,” she said coldly. “Leave him alone, you fool.”

Meg plucked at Cushing's sleeve. “The Holy of Holies?” she asked.

“What in the name of God are you talking about?”

“This place. It is the Holy of Holies. Can't you feel it?”

He shook his head. To him there seemed nothing holy about it. Frightening, yes. Forsaken, yes. A place to get away from as soon as one was able. A place of quiet that suddenly seemed to hold a strange unquietness. But nothing that was holy.

You are right
, the Trees said to him.
There is nothing holy here. This is the place of truth. Here we find the truth; here we extract the truth. This is the place of questioning, of examination. This is where we look into the soul
.

For an instant he seemed to see (in his imagination?) a grim and terrible figure dressed in black, with a black cowl that came down about a bony face that was merciless. The figure and the face struck terror into him. His legs were watery and bending; his body drooped and his brain became a blob of shaking jelly. His life, all his life, everything that he had ever been or seen or done, spilled out of him, and although it was out of him, he could feel sticky fingers with unclean fingernails plucking at it busily, sorting it out, probing it, examining it, judging it and then balling it all together in a scrawny, bony fist and stuffing it back into him again.

He stumbled forward on jerky legs that still seemed watery, and only by the greatest effort kept himself from falling. Meg was beside him, holding him and helping him, and in that moment his heart went out to her—this marvelous old hag who had trod uncomplainingly all the weary miles that had led them to this place.

“Straight ahead, laddie boy,” she said. “The way is open now. Just a little farther.”

Through bleary eyes he saw ahead of him an opening, a funnel with light at its other end, not just a little way, as she had said, but some distance off. He staggered on, with Meg close beside him, and although he did not look back to see—fearful that, looking back, he would lose the way—he knew that the others were coming on behind him.

Time stretched out, or seemed to stretch out, and then the tunnel's mouth was just ahead of him. With a final effort he lurched through it and saw ahead of him a rising slope of ground that went up and never seemed to stop, ground covered with the beautiful tawniness of sun-dried grass, broken by rocky ledges thrusting from the slope, dotted by clumps of bushes and here and there a tree.

Behind him Rollo said, “We made it, boss. We are finally here. We are on Thunder Butte.”

18

A short distance up the slope, they found a pool of water in a rock basin fed by a stream that barely trickled down a deep gully, with misshapen, wind-tortured cedars forming a half-hearted windbreak to the west. Here they built a meager fire of dead branches broken off the cedar trees, and broiled steaks cut off a haunch of venison that was on the point of becoming high.

They were up the slope far enough that they could see over the ring of the Trees to the plains beyond. There, just over the tip of the Trees, could be seen the toylike figures of the wardens. Their horses were bunched off to one side and the five wardens stood in line, facing toward the butte. At times they would fling their arms up in unison, and at other times, when the wind died down momentarily, those around the fire could hear their shrill keening.

Meg studied them through the glasses. “It's some sort of lament,” she said. “Rigid posturing, then a little dance step or two, then they throw up their arms and howl.”