The Cache (6 page)

When day came, he was deep in the desert, and he saw no signs of the hunting party or of Joel. The night had been moonless, and the ground was rocky.

Nevertheless, Benoni pushed eastwards, imaging that Joel would have fled in that direction and hoping that he would again run across him. He believed in events happening in three’s; he was sure he would meet Joel again. Next time, he would not delay.

The desert was somewhat different than the one he had known, but not too different. He rode the horse until it became apparent that there would be no water for it. Then, reluctantly, he killed it. After smoking as much of its meat as he could carry, he set out on foot. And here he had the same problems facing him as in the Fiinishan desert. These he solved in the same way, living off the plants and animals. A man who had not been born and bred there would have died in two days. But Benoni, alone and on foot, made fifteen miles a day. And, though he did not grow fat, he maintained his weight and his health, grew hard as the shell of a desert tortoise.

Now, he cut towards the northeast at night and slept during the heat of the day. The flat-land behind him, he began going around mountains where he could, over them where he could not. Generally, he followed an ancient trail. Doubtless, it had been one of the stone roads of the old ones. When he came to a place where dirt and sand was piled up in many hummocks for miles, he knew he was in the ruins of a city of the old ones. He did not sleep in the ruins but walked all night. He was very nervous, for he had heard that the ghosts of the old ones and earth demons flitted through the spaces between the hummocks. And, sometimes, they possessed the person unlucky enough to fall asleep.

He wondered if the stories were true about the old ones. Had they once been so numerous they filled this land, drank water piped in from the sea (which he had never seen), flown through the air in magical wagons, lived to be two hundred years old, talked to each other at great distances through magical devices? Was the story true that the old ones had fallen out among themselves and devastated each other with weapons so terrible it made his flesh crawl to hear of them? Or was the other story, that the demons of the earth had destroyed civilization, true?

The preachers said that almost all the knowledge of the old ones had been lost, that their books, even, were destroyed. Some parts of ancient scriptures, telling of the creation of the world, of Adam and Eve, of the wanderings of the lost Hebrews across the desert (this one?) and of Our Savior had been found. But these were incomplete, parts of them were lost. And it had taken half a century for the preachers in Fiiniks to decipher the spelling of the old ones. And even now they were very uncertain of the meanings of many words. In fact, disputes over the interpretations had led to a religious war about ten years before Benoni was born. The losers had fled westward through the desert. Their goal was the great ocean said to exist beyond the mountains.

Benoni could not read the Found Testaments; he had been lucky to be born in the ruling classes and given enough schooling to read the writing of Fiiniks, which differed from that of the old ones. The preachers said the writing of the old ones, though having an alphabet similar to the demotic, had different values in many cases. To master the old ones’ writings, a man had to spend almost all his time in the attempt. It was not worthwhile unless a man wanted to be a preacher. Benoni envied the power the preachers had, but he intended to become a big man in Fiiniks through other means.

Next dusk, Benoni walked onwards. A week later, he was almost surprised by a band of horsemen. They came around the corner of a mountain, and Benoni was almost caught in the open. He heard them about thirty seconds before they came into view, enough time to hide above the trail behind a boulder.

The riders were all men and dressed strangely. They wore clothes tied around the head that fell halfway down their back, and their bodies were covered in loose robes of many colors. Their standard-bearer carried a white flag on which was a golden hive and large golden bees swarming from the hive. By this, Benoni guessed that the men were a war party from Deseret. He had heard about Deseret from Navahos he had talked to in the market-place during the December-January trade-truce. They said that the white men of Deseret had once been a small community on the Great Salt Lake, that they had a strange religion something like that of the Fiinishans. That during the past hundred years they had increased in numbers, were pressing upon the Navahos, and had conquered much territory to the east.

Benoni watched them go by regretfully. To take the scalp of a Deseret man would bring him much honor at home.

He went on, and two days later passed near the remains of a village of Indians. The Indians were dead, probably victims of the Deseret war party that had passed him. Every corpse had been stripped of its scalp. Benoni felt contempt for the Deseret men. It was all right to kill enemy women and children, for that meant the women would bear no more males, the male children would not grow up to kill you, and the female children would not grow up to bear males. But there was nothing about the deed to warrant honor. You left those scalps untouched.

Four weeks later, after going over a great mountain range, Benoni left the desert. It was almost like stepping from one room to another. On one side, sand and rocks and cacti. On the other, grass and trees.

He was in a country of great plains cut occasionally by creeks and, now and then, a small river. There were many trees along the waterways; not so many on the plains. Yet even here there were enough to make him think this land rich in wood. Here began the great herds of antelopes, deer, wild horses, longhorned cattle, and huge pigs. Here also were flocks of birds in such number they darkened the sky as they flew overhead. Here, naturally, were the packs of wild dogs, big wolfish creatures, and, not so naturally, here were lions. Benoni was surprised to find them, for he had always thought of the lion as a mountain beast. But these lions were not the slim animals he had seen. These were great cats weighing at least four hundred pounds, thick-limbed, and seven to eight feet from tip of nose to tip of tail. Aside from their size and more massive legs, they looked just like the cats at home, and he wondered if they were not descended from them. On the plains, they had changed into creatures large enough to stalk and kill the dangerous longhorns.

He gave them a wide berth. At night, though he did not like to attract human eyes, he built a ring of fire to keep the lions away.

However, it was the wild dogs who almost got him. One dawn they came sweeping silently over the horizon just as he was arising from sleep. He ran like a deer, and managed to get up a tree which was fortunately nearby. He stayed there for a day and night while the dogs howled and leaped vainly. In the morning, the dogs left. He came down.

The following evening, Benoni built a bed in the branches of a tree. And, before going to sleep, he considered what he was doing. Almost without thinking about it, he had pushed so far east that he might well be past the point of returning. Not that there was anything to keep him from going back. It was just that the lure of the distant grassy horizons was getting stronger with every mile. He had planned to stop short many scores of miles back and make a decision whether he should look for a new country or take his scalps back to Fiiniks. Day had succeeded day, and he had put off the final decision. Now, he wondered if the Great River he had heard his father and the preachers talk of was only a short distance away. No-one, as far as he knew, had ever come this far from the Valley of the Sun. This adventure alone would be enough to make him the talk of Fiiniks. He would be able to tell tales about it the rest of his life. And, perhaps, his children—and Debra’s—could some day travel the same path and even go on to the Great River.

Debra! Was she now pledged to marry Joel Vahndert because Benoni had not come back and she thought him dead?

He fell asleep wondering. In the morning, when he came down from the tree, he decided to put the choice of his path in the hands of Jehovah God. After washing himself thoroughly in a nearby creek, he got down on his knees and prayed. Then, he stood up, took his knife out of its scabbard, and flipped it high into the air. He stepped back and watched it turn over and over, flashing in the morning sun. If it came down point first to stick in the ground, he would continue east. If the butt of the knife struck first, he would turn back towards Fiiniks.

The knife whirled. And its butt hit the grass, and it bounced up to fall on its side.

Benoni put the knife back in its scabbard. Aloud, he said, “You have shown me what I should do, Jehovah! And I hope I am not doing wrong by changing my mind. But I intend to go straight ahead. I should not have asked You, because I knew in my heart secretly what I wanted to do:”

Uneasy because he had ignored the omen, he walked on. For several days, he expected something terrible to happen: an attack by one of the huge lions, a bite from a rattlesnake, an arrow from behind a bush. But nothing out of the way occurred. After a week, he lost the uneasiness.

During the next two months, he had many adventures. But he always escaped from death or injury. Many times he had to hide to evade human beings. Usually, these were Indians. Four times, however, the danger was white men. A pack of wild dogs chased him, and again he barely made it to a tree. Once, a lion walked out of the dense vegetation surrounding a waterhole, and Benoni prepared to fight to the death: his death, he supposed. But the lion merely belched and stood his ground, and Benoni walked on.

A few days later, Benoni was peering from behind a bush at the strangest habitation he had ever seen. It was huge, perhaps four-hundred feet long and forty-feet high, wide in the middle and tapering to a point at one end. The other end was covered with the dirt of a hill. Its curving sides rose from the ground in a manner suggesting that only the upper half could be seen and that another half was buried under the ground. It shone in the morning sun, reflecting like Navaho silver. It had no doors or windows that he could see, and he circled the entire structure to get a good look. If it had an entrance, he decided, it must be behind the high log walls and gate of a stockade butting against the curving sides of the south side. Another log stockade mounted the central portion of the top of the structure; this, obviously, had been built as a look-out.

He dared not come any closer, for people were coming out of the open log gates. Some of them were tall husky men armed with bows and arrows, spears, and short, broad bladed iron swords.

The inhabitants looked like Navahos except that their noses were flatter, almost bridge-less, and they had folds of skin over the inner corners of the eyes. These folds gave them a slant-eyed look. Moreover, when several got close enough for him to hear, they spoke a harsh sing song tongue no more like Navaho than Navaho was like Mek or Ingklich.

Benoni knew that the buried metal cone must contain many people. The narrow log enclosure by its side would not hold them if they stood on each other’s heads. Soon, the men, women, and children moved out to work the fall crops and became so numerous that he had to leave the vicinity.

He went eastward but not without puzzling for a long time over the weird metal building and its weird inhabitants.

Two months later, he had put the plains behind him and was deep into a heavily forested land of rolling hills with many water-filled washes and rivers that was noisy and bright with birds he had never seen before. He passed the ruins of a farmhouse that had only recently been burned, for the ashes were warm. The corpse of a man, two women, and three children lay outside the ruins. Benoni knew that he was in a country of different customs, for every body lacked its head.

An hour later, he picked up again the tracks of horses which had led away from the bodies but which he had lost. He told himself that he should go at right angles to the war party. But he was too curious; he could not resist following.

Just before dusk, Benoni saw the light of a fire ahead. He worked his way through the tall grass and brush very slowly. By nightfall, he was behind a tree only twenty yards away from the war party. He gasped, and he began shaking. Never before had he seen men with such black skins, such thick lips, such kinky hair. It was not just that he had not thought of such men. As a child he had heard, and believed, tales of black giants who dwelt far to the east near the Great River. These ate flesh, would eat him if he did not behave as a good child should.

These men were tall but not the twelve-foot giants his mother had told him about. They did look ferocious, however. They wore red and white warpaint and headdresses of long white feathers. They also wore human hands strung on a necklace. One man had a pole mounted with a human skull, and some of the bags on the ground looked just the right size to carry heads.

Benoni watched them for a long time. He crawled closer, unable to resist his curiosity about their speech. This sounded like his, yet not like it. Sometimes, he thought he could identify a word, but he could never be sure. They were laughing and drinking from quart jugs, which he supposed they had taken from the farmhouse. They did not seem to worry at all about pursuit.

The September moon rose, and the black men kept laughing and joking until the jugs were empty. They threw these into the weeds and lay down to sleep. One youth was appointed guard; he stationed himself with spear and short sword a few yards outside the range of the fire, which had died down.

Benoni waited for an hour, then he made his way towards the sentinel. Easily, he crept up behind the nodding youth and chopped against the side of his neck with the edge of his palm. He caught the youth as he fell and eased him to the ground. Then, using the fellow’s shorts, he gagged him. Using his belt, he tied his hands behind him. A few minutes later, he silently saddled two horses. After he had hoisted the youth belly-down onto one of the animals, he cut the hobbles around the other. Two whinnied and shied away, and he froze, waiting for the sleeping blacks to awake. They slept the sleep of the half drunk.