The Game of Stars and Comets

by Andre Norton

  "Dangungha," she repeated. "Then where—?"

  I shrugged. "My father is trek master, his the trail plan."

  Her frown had grown deeper. "I do not like it—there is—but it is true that one does not question Mac's coming—or going—one never did. He is a man to keep his own council. Only one ever could speak freely with him—"

  I thought I could guess—

  "My mother?"

  "Yes. We thought him a dour, secretive man. Only when he was with her it was as if he threw away all defenses and came fully alive. You would not have known him, seeing him as he is today. She was his light—and much of his life. He is Shadow touched now, even if he himself never came under the curse in body or mind. I wish—" her voice trailed away into nothingness and I sat in courteous silence, though I began to wish that I were free of this hall. For to me it seemed like a cage, pressing in upon me.

  There was the good smell of fresh bread, of other things which meant a well-run household. But such caught in my throat as if I smothered in them. I wanted the outside where there was no hum of talk, no clatter of loom, of pans, no bustle of work strange to me.

  My hostess roused from her thoughts. "There is no reasoning with him. That we learned years since. He will go his own way, though to take you with him—"

  Now a spark of heat flared in me. "Lady, I want nothing more than to be my father's son."

  Once more she looked into my eyes and there was a sternness in her face as she answered me:

  "Only a fool would say that was—is—not so. You must go your way in spite of all. The Faith of Fortune," between us she sketched in the air the sign of a blessing, "be with you Bart s'Lorn. You need the best that fair-wishing can bring you. We shall say your name before the Hearth Candle here each night."

  I bowed my head and indeed she moved me with that solemn promise. I, who had no roots, nor had ever wanted them, did not know until that moment what it might mean to be so treated, as if indeed I were blood-kin with those ready to stand at my side, or at my back, were evil to rise in my path.

  "Lady, I give you the thanks of the heart," I fumbled with courtesy words I had never had reason to use before. "It is a very kindly thing you do."

  "Little enough." That set sternness was still in her face. "Little enough, for there is no turn in a chosen road. Give to Mac my good-wishing also, if he will take it, or if he ever thinks of the past which once was. He is—No, I shall not say such words to you. I do him no wrong in my thoughts, only I hold for him a very great pity."

  She arose then and I got to my feet as swiftly, sensing that she would dismiss me. Still she walked again by my side down the hall and saw me through the door with full guest honor. I did not look back after the farewell words were said between us, for, oddly enough, I still felt uneasy and afraid. Not as I had when we had spoken of the Shadow—that was a thing which all men found ill to discuss—but rather I feared the hall itself and the abundant life there, a strange and alien life which in some way was vaguely threatening to my own.

  My father had not chosen to outspan in the visitor's field, but had camped down by the river, some distance from the holding buildings. I had started down the footpath which led to the water and so on to our wagon when someone came from behind to match step with me.

  I glanced up startled, for I had been deep in my thoughts. It was Illo, the healer, and her stride was free and near as long as mine, that of a traveler who had been on many trails in the past. There was a pack resting against her shoulders, a weather cloak folded and strapped to the top of that. She wore the thick-soled boots of a tramper, and in one hand was her healer's staff, a straight cutting of qui wood which had been peeled and smoothed so that it seemed to shine in the sunlight as if it were a rod of pure brilliance such as lit Portcity buildings.

  "How can I serve you?" I asked quickly, for healers never come to any one save for a purpose. They do not walk idly, nor do they seek out conversation save when they have something meaningful to impart.

  "You travel north. So do I go also. My way is long, and—" now she returned my glance, "perhaps there is little time. The truth being I would ask passage with you."

  Such a temporary arrangement between loper and healer was not unknown, usually when, as Illo said now, there was a need for speed on a long trip. But the miners at Dengungha were all off-world men and they clung always stubbornly to a belief in their own medics. There would be no call for a healer to seek them out.

  "I do not seek the mines—" She was not reading my thought, of course. It must be well known by now where we would travel once we had crossed river. "There is another place."

  Illo did not name it, and it was not courtesy to ask. Though I could not recall any holding now to the north—unless some party had gathered more courage to front the unknown during the months just behind us, and trailed into the forbidden land for a groundbreaking.

  However, though a healer had the right to ask passage, I could not see that my father would take kindly to this addition to our party. Yet there was no refusal he could give and not offend all custom. She said nothing more, only walked beside me to our camp.

  My father sat on his heels beside the fire. Close to his hand lay a pipe and from it trailed still a small thread of smoke. He had been indulging himself in his one great extravagance, for the dried stuff he smoked was from off-world and could only be obtained by near ruinous bargaining with some shipsman. What he took in such trades from time to time he guarded so well and used so seldom that a small pouch of it would last him for many months. Also he used it only, I had come to know, when he was low in spirit, or else under that dark cloud which made him, sometimes for days, even more silent and aloof.

  He had a reader out and there was a coil of tape set in it. But he was not using it, rather looking into the fire as if whatever message he would know was better found there.

  A loper learns quickly certain measures for protection. Our hearing, I am sure, is better than that of any who are holding born, or off-worlder. Though both my new companion and I wore the soft, many-fold soled boots which favored the feet of those who traveled, yet he became aware of us and glanced up.

  That his mood was no good one I could see at once. The frown which he turned upon Illo was dark. He got slowly to his feet, a little stiffly, but standing as straight as her staff should she set it pole-like in the earth.

  "Lady—" even that word as he said it had the grating sound of some tool seldom used, even a little rust bound in a setting.

  "I am Illo," she said. The healers never used honor words by choice. "I would travel beyond the river," she came directly to the point.

  My father's frown grew darker and now he looked to me in accusation. I knew that it was in his mind then that I had, without reference to him, made some promise to this girl. Only again she must have understood at once.

  "There have been no promises made to me," she said coolly. Nor did she glance to me. "You are trekmaster, so I say to you—I have need to go beyond the river."

  "Why?" my father asked starkly and boldly. "There are no holdings there—now—"

  "And the miners have their medics?" she completed his thought almost before that "now" was out from between his lips. "It is true, Trekmaster. Still—there is a need for me to go beyond the river. And—since there are no holdings, I come to you. All men know that Mac s'Ban alone travels there."

  "The land is cursed." There was no friendliness in him, even though that inner peace which the healers cast (perhaps without willing it, merely because they are what they are) must be touching him as it was me. It would appear that his stubbornness was proof even against that.

  "All men know that also—even the off-worlders," she agreed. "Do they not put force fields about where they hack and despoil the earth? Yet I say and mean it—there is a need for me in the north."

  No man on Voor could stand against such a statement. A healer could sense the need for her services, and, having once had that call, there was nothing save her own hurt
or death which could hold her back from answering it. Nor would any man stand against the compulsion which moved her when she so would journey. My father might hate to give her wagon room because of those dark depths and sorrows within him, but he could not say her no.

  We broke camp with the dawn. My father had not asked me anything concerning my talk with the Lady of the holding, nor had I volunteered even her greetings, for the fact that we were three in camp instead of two made him as unapproachable as if there was about him a forcefield. Maybe there was—one of his will.

  The gars came to the yoking at my whistle as I had long since trained them to do. They never wandered far in their grazing and lopers often said that we had the best-trained animals on the plains. There were six of them, prime beasts, for we tended them many times better than we treated ourselves. Against the brittle, sun-dried grass of the land their dusky blue-gray hides were plain to see. And they were beginning to grow the heavier coats of winter wool.

  As we did not use them for holding tasks my father had never allowed their horns to be blunted, for there were beasts abroad eager enough to taste gar meat, and he insisted they must be able to defend themselves. There were three bulls, massive creatures with a wide curl of horn, two sprouting from above their eyes, the third and sharpest from the nose. The other three were their mates, for the gars, like the human kind on most worlds, were monogamous, and also they mated for life. It was well known that a gar whose mate was slain or died of some accident often grieved and would not graze until it, too, wasted away.

  Our wagon was port built under my father's orders and design, much of it finished by his hands and mine, and less than two years old now. It was of bals wood which, cut green, can be shaped—then, when dried under the sun for the right number of days, becomes metal-hard. Such could stand years of heavy use and yet not show scratch nor dent.

  It was divided into sections, two for cargo—one small, one for that of bulk—while the front and third portion could serve as a home in storm time. Though most lopers have an ingrown desire to sleep in a bag under the trekwagons themselves when it can be done. We do not like walls, as I have said.

  The river crossing was a ford, easy enough to make at this time of the year, since only the spring rains brought it high and fast enough to offer any mishap. On the far side there was a faint trace of road but my father turned from that and struck out across the width of the land itself.

  If one were a bird or one of the fluttersnakes from the Tangle—one could perhaps have seen more than just a very distant blue shadow in the far distance. We lopers did not travel by set trail or roads in this part of the continent—if any other lopers ever took to the north except my father and I. There was a com receiver in the wagon which could set up an automatic guide to Dengungha but it was apparent my father was not going to depend upon that now.

  I waited, as I walked beside our lead gars, for some question or even direction from Illo. However she paced steadily at our long learned stride—or near its equivalent—with no more words than my father had to offer.

  Gars for all their bulk can even run should the situation demand such effort from them. The stampede of a wild gar clan is no safe thing. However their usual procedure is a steady trot which a man can match without undue effort, if he is trained to it. Our beasts always kept to that in the north, unless brought to a halt at order. It was as if they neither liked the land nor trusted it no more than we did and so preferred to keep in motion. Whereas in the south they often slowed to catch up mouthfuls of any brush or tall growing grass to munch wetly and noisily as they went.

  We veered west steadily, though I knew well enough that the mine lay due north, and westward there could be nothing at all save one evil tongue of the Tangle which licked out into the plains, forming a curve as if to entrap therein any foolish enough to venture so near to its vile mass.

  Men had flown over the Tangle with Survey instruments in the early days of Voor's first discovery. It registered life, but what kind of life no out-world built com or pick-up had ever been able to distinguish. From the air—I had seen the picture tapes—it looked like a thick, puffy, grey blanket—like smoke perhaps. Yet smoke would move, billow, thin or thicken and the Tangle did not.

  From the ground it was an impenetrable mass of vegetation, so thick grown as to defy anything but a flamer to cut one's way in. Since there was plenty of empty land for which a settler did not have to fight, the Tangle was not so warred against. People had been lost in it, yes, flitters downed. If there had ever been any survivors of those crashes they had certainly never won free. As for getting out a guiding rescue call by com—that was impossible. A faculty the experts could not pin down made every com instrument go dead when one went so low as to skim just above the billows.

  Yet now we were headed in a direction which could only eventually bring us to the Tangle's edge. As far as I knew there were not even any holding ruins in that direction and I could not understand what my father desired. When we nooned and ate our journey meat and drank from the wagon cans we had filled at the river, the brightness of the sun was dimmed by gathering clouds.

  I saw Witol, our lead gar, a tough old bull on whose instincts any man might well depend (if he were Voor wise at all) lift his heavy head from grazing and turn west and a little south, his huge nostrils expanding as if to catch the slightest change in the wind which had risen with the gathering clouds. He snorted loudly and his team fellows also stopped their eating, likewise turning to face the west.

  My father, who had been hunched silently moments earlier over a mug of res-tea which he had no more than sipped, got to his feet, and, like Witol, looked west into that wind. I did likewise, for the chill in the air grew sharper, and, though our senses are so much more the less than the beasts who accompanied us, I was at last able to catch a scent.

  It was something which could not possibly come from the open land before us. Only once had I picked up such an odor and that had been when my father's wanderings had led us well down the Halb into a place of swamps, unusual to find on the Big Land. There the same stench had struck us as that wet and slimy land had lain until the hot touch of midsummer sun. It was sickening—as if the wind now blew across some matter long gone into decay.

  Illo moved a step or two out, away from the wagon, from the uneasy gars whose snorts had become grunts signaling rising uneasiness so that I went among them quickly, rubbing their big heads between the horns, making them aware of me. For gars seem, in spite of their awesome bulk, to depend upon our species when confronted by the strange and threatening. But the healer had her hands now raised to mask the lower part of her face, her eyes showing bright and intent above her interlaced fingers.

  Though I strained to see, for our distance glasses were in my father's belt pouch and he had not taken them out, there was nothing but the rolling land and the wind blown grass. Illo turned her head a little and looked to my father.

  "It—they move—"

  His head jerked as if she had slapped him. In spite of the dark tint the sun had set upon him I saw a flush burn along his cheeks. He reached out and his hand fell upon her shoulder, tightened. He even shook her, until his control almost instantly returned and he moved away from her quickly, as if she herself were the source of some contagion and he wanted to put safe space between them.

  "What do you know?" His tone was savage in its harsh demand.

  "I am from Voor's Grove." She had dropped her masking hands. There was no sign of outrage on her face, her calmness remained complete.

  He might have forgotten all the rest. To him now she could be the only important thing in the world.

  "What do you remember?" Some of the harshness had faded from his voice, but the demand remained, even more intense.

  "Nothing—I was only three. I do not even know why I and Attcan, Mehil lived—though they were only cradle babies then. There was Krisan also. But surely you know of what happened at Voor's—you who are ever seeking to find the secret of the curse."
r />   "You are a healer—you have talents—a gift—" it was as if he now pleaded with her.

  She shook her head. "But no more memory than does your son. It is only this to know—some children, always Voor born, second generation, survive the Shadow curse. Do you not think that the medics, the off-worlds' experts, have not tried, poked and pried, sent me into talk-sleep—done everything known to their science to wring an answer from me."

  "They did that to you?"

  Illo looked surprised. "Did they not also test your son in that same way?"

  "No!" His denial was vehement. "No child should—why were they allowed to do this to you?"

  She lost none of her serenity. "Because there was no one to speak for me and say they could not. Perhaps I should even be grateful to them, for it may have been their proving which released what you call my 'gift'. It is known that such a talent often manifests itself suddenly after illness or some injury. But what happened long in the past does not matter now—what does is the message this wind carries. Somewhere the Shadows must prowl."