Maker of Universes (12 page)

Kickaha grinned as if relishing the memory. Wolff said, “The Lord who sent the gworl ahead is the present Lord, right? Who is he?”

“Arwoor. The Lord who’s missing was known as Jadawin. He must be the man who called himself Vannax. Arwoor moved in, and ever since he’s been trying to find me and the horn.”

Kickaha outlined what had happened to him since he had found himself on the Atlantean tier. During the twenty years (of Earth time), he had been living on one tier or another, always in disguise. The gworl and the ravens, now serving the Lord Arwoor, had never stopped looking for him. But there were long periods of time, sometimes two or three years on end, when Kickaha had not been disturbed.

“Wait a minute,” Wolff said. “If the gates between the tiers were closed, how did the gworl get down off the monolith to chase you?”

Kickaha had not been able to understand that either. However, when captured by the gworl in the Garden level, he had questioned them. Although surly, they had given him some answers. They had been lowered to the Atlantean tier by cords.

“Thirty thousand feet?” Wolff said.

“Sure, why not? The palace is a fabulous many-chambered storehouse. If I’d had a chance to look long enough, I’d have found the cords myself. Anyway, the gworl told me they were charged by the Lord Arwoor not to kill me. Even if it meant having to let me escape at the time. He wants me to enjoy a series of exquisite tortures. The gworl said that Arwoor had been working on new and subtle techniques, plus refining some of the well established methods. You can imagine how I was sweating it out on the journey back.”

After his capture in the Garden, Kickaha was taken across Okeanos to the base of the monolith. While they were climbing up it, a raven Eye stopped them. He had carried the news of Kickaha’s capture to the Lord, who sent him back with orders. The gworl were to split into two bands. One was to continue with Kickaha. The other was to return to the Garden rim. If the man who now had the horn were to return through the gate with it, he was to be captured. The horn would be brought back to the Lord.

Kickaha said, “I imagine Arwoor wanted you brought back, too. He probably forgot to relay such an order to the gworl through the raven. Or else he assumed you’d be taken to him, forgetting that the gworl are very literal-minded and unimaginative.

“I don’t know why the gworl captured Chryseis. Perhaps they intend to use her as a peace-offering to the Lord. The gworl know he is displeased with them because I’ve led them such a long and sometimes merry chase. They may mean to placate him with the former Lord’s most beautiful masterpiece.”

Wolff said, “Then the present Lord can’t travel between tiers via the resonance points?”

“Not without the horn. And I’ll bet he’s in a hot-and-cold running sweat right now. There’s nothing to prevent the gworl from using the horn to go to another universe and present it to another Lord. Nothing except their ignorance of where the resonance points are. If they should find one... However, they didn’t use it by the boulder, so I imagine they won’t try it elsewhere. They’re vicious but not bright.”

Wolff said, “If the Lords are such masters of super-science, why doesn’t Arwoor use aircraft to travel?”

Kickaha laughed for a long time. Then he said, “That’s the joker. The Lords are heirs to a science and power far surpassing Earth’s. But the scientists and technicians of their people are dead. The ones now living know how to operate their devices, but they are incapable of explaining the principles behind them or of repairing them.

“The millenia-long power struggle killed off all but a few. These few, despite their vast powers, are ignoramuses. They’re sybarites, megalomaniacs, paranoiacs, you name it. Anything but scientists.

“It’s possible that Arwoor may be a dispossessed Lord. He had to run for his life, and it was only because Jadawin was gone for some reason from this world that Arwoor was able to gain possession of it. He came empty-handed into the palace; he has no access to any powers except those in the palace, many of which he may not know how to control. He’s one up in this Lordly game of muscial universes, but he’s still handicapped.”

Kickaha fell asleep. Wolff stared into the night, for he was on first watch. He did not find the story incredible, but he did think that there were holes in it. Kickaha had much more explaining to do. Then there was Chryseis. He thought of an achingly beautiful face with delicate bone structure and great cat-pupiled eyes. Where was Chryseis, how was she faring, and would he ever see her again?

VIII

D
URING
W
OLFF’S
second watch, something black and long and swift slipped through the moonlight between two bushes. Wolff sent an arrow into the predator, which gave a whistling scream and reared up on its hind legs, towering twice as high as a horse. Wolff fitted another arrow to the string and fired it into the white belly. Still the animal did not die, but went whistling and crashing away through the brush.

By then Kickaha, knife in hand, was beside him. “You were lucky,” he said. “You don’t always see them, and then, pffft! They go for the throat.”

“I could have used an elephant gun,” Wolff said, “and I’m not sure that would have stopped it. By the way, why don’t the gworl—or the Indians, from what you’ve told me—use firearms?”

“It’s strictly forbidden by the Lord. You see, the Lord doesn’t like some things. He wants to keep his people at a certain population level, at a certain technological level, and within certain social structures. The Lord runs a tight planet.

“For instance, he likes cleanliness. You may have noticed that the folk of Okeanos are a lazy, happy-go-lucky lot. Yet they always clean up their messes. No litter anywhere. The same goes on this level, on every level. The Amerindians are also personally clean, and so are the Drachelanders and Atlanteans. The Lord wants it that way, and the penalty for disobedience is death.”

“How does he enforce his rules?” Wolff asked.

“Mostly by having implanted them in the mores of the inhabitants. Originally, he had a close contact with the priests and medicine men, and by using religion—with himself as the deity—he formed and hardened the ways of the populace. He liked neatness, disliked firearms or any form of advanced technology. Maybe he was a romantic; I don’t know. But the various societies on this world are mainly conformist and static.”

“So what? Is progress necessarily desirable or a static society undesirable? Personally, though I detest the Lord’s arrogance, his cruelty and lack of humanity, I approve of some of the things he’s done. With some exceptions, I like this world, far prefer it to Earth.”

“You’re a romantic, too!”

“Maybe. This world is real and grim enough, as you already know. But it’s free of grit and grime, of diseases of any kind, of flies and mosquitoes and lice. Youth lasts as long as you live. All in all, it’s not such a bad place to live in. Not for me, anyway.”

Wolff was on the last watch when the sun rounded the corner of the world. The starflies paled, and the sky was green wine. The air passed cool fingers over the two men and washed their lungs with invigorating currents. They stretched and then went down from the platform to hunt for breakfast. Later, full of roast rabbit and juicy berries, they renewed their journey.

The evening of the third day after, while the sun was a hand’s breadth from slipping around the monolith, they were out on the plain. Ahead of them was a tall hill beyond which, so Kickaha said, was a small woods. One of the high trees there would give them refuge for the night.

Suddenly a party of about forty men rode around the hill. They were dark-skinned and wore their hair in two long braids. Their faces were painted with white and red streaks and black X’s. Their lower arms bore small round shields, and they held lances or bows in their hands. Some wore bear-heads as helmets; others had feathers stuck into caps or wore bonnets with sweeping bird feathers.

Seeing the two men on foot before them, the riders yelled and urged their horses into a gallop. Lances tipped with steel points were leveled. Bows were fitted, with arrows, and heavy steel axes or blade-studded clubs were lifted.

“Stand firm!” Kickaha said. He was grinning. “They are the Hrowakas, the Bear People. My people.”

He stepped forward and lifted his bow above him with both hands. He shouted at the charging men in their own tongue, a speech with many glottalized stops, nasalized vowels, and a swift-rising but slowdescending intonation.

Recognizing him, they shouted,
“AngKungawas TreKickaha!”
They galloped by, their spears stabbing as closely as possible without touching him, the clubs and axes whistling across his face or above his head, and arrows plunging near his feet or even between them.

Wolff was given the same treatment, which he bore without flinching. Like Kickaha, he showed a smile, but he did not think that it was relaxed.

The Hrowakas wheeled their horses and charged back. This time they pulled their beasts up short, rearing, kicking, and whinnying. Kickaha leaped up and dragged a feather-bonneted youth from his animal. Laughing and panting, the two wrestled on the ground until Kickaha had pinned the Hrowakas. Then Kickaha arose and introduced the loser to Wolff.

“NgashuTangis, one of my brothers-in-law.”

Two Amerinds dismounted and greeted Kickaha with much embracing and excited speech. Kickaha waited until they were calmed down and then began to speak long and earnestly. He frequently jabbed his finger toward Wolff. After a fifteen-minute discourse, interrupted now and then by a brief question, he turned smiling to Wolff.

“We’re in luck. They’re on their way to raid the Tsenakwa, who live fairly close to the Trees of Many Shadows. I explained what we were doing here, though not all of it by any means. They don’t know we’re bucking the Lord himself, and I’m not about to tell them. But they do know we’re on the trail of Chryseis and the gworl and that you’re a friend of mine. They also know that Podarge is helping us. They’ve got a great respect for her and her eagles and would like to do her a favor if they could.

“They’ve got plenty of spare horses, so take your choice. Only thing I hate about this is that you won’t get to visit the lodges of the Bear People and I’ll miss seeing my two wives, Giushowei and Angwanat. But you can’t have everything.”

The war party rode hard that day and the next, changing horses every half-hour. Wolff became saddle-sore-blanket-sore, rather. By the third morning he was in as good a shape as any of the Bear People and could stay on a horse all day without feeling that he had lockjaw in every muscle of his body and even in some of the bones.

The fourth day, the party was held up for eight hours. A herd of the giant bearded bison marched across their path; the beasts formed a column two miles across and ten miles long, a barrier that no one, man or animal, could cross. Wolff chafed, but the others were not too unhappy, because riders and horses alike needed a rest. Then, at the end of the column, a hundred Shanikotsa hunters rode by, intent on driving their lances and arrows into the bison on the fringes. The Hrowakas wanted to swoop down upon them and slay the entire group and only an impassioned speech by Kickaha kept them back. Afterwards, Kickaha told Wolff that the Bear People thought one of them was equal to ten of any other tribe.

“They’re great fighters, but a little bit overconfident and arrogant. If you know how many times I’ve had to talk them out of getting into situations where they would have been wiped out!”

They rode on, but were halted at the end of an hour by NgashuTangis, one of the scouts for that day. He charged in yelling and gesturing. Kickaha questioned him, then said to Wolff, “One of Podarge’s pets is a couple of miles from here. She landed in a tree and requested NgashuTangis to bring me to her. She can’t make it herself; she’s been ripped up by a flock of ravens and is in a bad way. Hurry!”

The eagle was sitting on the lowest branch of a lone tree, her talons clutched about the narrow limb, which bent under her weight. Dried red-black blood covered her green feathers, and one eye had been torn out. With the other, she glared at the Bear People, who kept a respectful distance. She spoke in Mycenaean to Kickaha and Wolff.

“I am Aglaia. I know you of old, Kickaha—Kickaha the trickster. And I saw you, O Wolff, when you were a guest of great-winged Podarge, my sister and queen. She it was who sent many of us out to search for the dryad Chryseis and the gworl and the horn of the Lord. But I, I alone, saw them enter the Trees of Many Shadows on the other side of the plain.

“I swooped down on them, hoping to surprise them and seize the horn. But they saw me and formed a wall of knives against which I could only impale myself. So I flew back up, so high they could not see me. But I, far-sighted treader of the skies, could see them.”

“They’re arrogant even while dying,” Kickaha said softly in English to Wolff. “Rightly so.”

The eagle drank water offered by Kickaha, and continued. “When night fell, they camped at the edge of a copse of trees. I landed on the tree below which the dryad slept under a deerskin robe. It had dried blood on it, I suppose from the man who had been killed by the gworl. They were butchering him, getting ready to cook him over their fires.

“I came down to the ground on the opposite side of the tree. I had hoped to talk to the dryad, perhaps even enable her to escape. But a gworl sitting near her heard the flutter of my wings. He looked around the tree, and that was his mistake, for my claws took him in his eyes. He dropped his knife and tried to tear me loose from his face. And so he did, but much of his face and both eyes came along with my talons. I told the dryad to run then, but she stood up and the robe fell off. I could see then that her hands and her legs were bound.

“I went into the brush, leaving the gworl to wail for his eyes. For his death, too, because his fellows would not be burdened with a blind warrior. I escaped through the woods and back to the plains. There I was able to fly off again. I flew toward the nest of the Bear People to tell you, O Kickaha and O Wolff, beloved of the dryad. I flew all night and on into the day.