The Game of Stars and Comets

by Andre Norton

  Now he did take out the distance glasses, and, using them, turned his head slowly right to left and then back again even more slowly.

  "Nothing—nothing which can be seen. There is no holding now in this way—"

  "Not now," she agreed. "But bear you only a little more west and then north again and Voor's Grove will lie before you."

  For the first time my father looked uneasy, as if she had caught him without any ready words.

  "I am sorry, healer—" his voice was hardly above a mutter.

  "There is no need for any distress. It is there I would go—"

  "Why?" I asked that from where I stood with my arm laid across Witol's wide back. The smell of his hide had driven out for me that wind borne stench of corruption.

  It was a breech of custom, of good manners to ask such a question of a healer. Still I could not hold it back. In our wanderings we had visited near all of the forsaken holdings of the north, but never had my father returned to Mungo's, nor did I expect him to. What lay at the place of her past life which drew her now?

  "Why?" she repeated. She did not look at me, or even at my father, rather into the distance, as if she needed no glasses but already could pick out there her destination. "Why? I do not know, but it is a call—one I cannot ignore."

  "There can be no one there," my father pointed out. "It is not good to see what was once—"

  He had hesitated but she finished the sentence for him calmly:

  "A part of my life? I cannot remember. Perhaps if I returned there I could. What they did to me has left me with the need to know, only until now I did not feel that so strongly. Now it has become a call, like to such which the talent makes a part of us when there lies sickness and suffering somewhere and no help to hand. I cannot turn back—"

  Though the clouds had grown heavier the wind had fallen away. I could no longer smell that stench. Loper that I was, and so weatherwise, I dared to speak up to my father:

  "There is a storm coming—and we have no shelter."

  Storms on the wide plains can be deadly—a strike of lightning out of the sky can kill man and beast. The torrent of autumn rain is always chill, and, more often than not, brings a burden of hail. I have seen such stones bury themselves half into the earth by the force of their fall, they being near large enough to cover most of my outstretched palm.

  The gars were bellowing now, turning their backs to what wind there was. Witol threw up his head, sounded a summoning call. I leaped aside away from him, knowing that no voice or hand, no matter how accustomed he might be to it day by day, would hold him now. We were only lucky that we had out-spanned and that the half-maddened animals would not drag the wagon with them.

  They went, their ropey tails up, their eyes rolling in growing terror. My father wasted no time in worry over whether we might round them up once again, or whether they would run on until exhausted, or perhaps come to earth with broken legs caught in some grass-hidden hole. Once more he caught Illo by the arm, to draw her swiftly to the wagon, pushing her up to me, where I had leaped to the foreseat, with as little ceremony as if she had been a bale of such goods as could take rough handling.

  We near tumbled back into the living section with hardly time to scramble out of my father's way as he threw himself after. Then we were both up, he and I, making fast the flap covering, moving along the sides of the wagon from one section to the next to test each cover latch and pushing the heaviest part of what we carried into the center as a makeshift anchor against the fury on its way.

  The dark was now that of night. We did not light any lamp. Such, too, might become an added danger if what we expected came to pass. And it did.

  That wind which had come early was but the gentlest of breezes against the force which slammed against the wagon, its roar enough to make anyone deaf. There had been a change in the direction of the fury; it blew from the west yet seemed to be altering towards the north. Under and around us our transport shuddered, shook, seemed to cower closer to the earth. If we had only had time we could have dug out beneath its wheels, letting it sink lower to the ground for anchorage. But that time had not been granted us.

  The screech of the wind, which arose higher and higher in the scale like the scream of a woman under torture, was endless. I did not hesitate to crouch on my knees, my hands over my ears to shut out what I could of that fury. The wagon moved—swaying first from side to side until I was sure we could crash, then ahead, as if the wind had some intelligence and so had taken us prisoner.

  I was thrown forward and landed against another form. Our arms reached out, caught at each other's bodies. I was locked with Illo in an embrace of stark fear when the hail struck with the same punishing force as the wind which bore it.

  Chapter 3

  The wagon continued to rock. Also it was again moving forward as if the wind was exerting full force against it. Though the grasslands might seem, under their covering of growth, to be flat surface, they were not. There were dips and hollows, small rises here and there, so that our transport now trembled on the edge of being completely thrown from its wheels and I could not understand how we continued to remain upright.

  I had known autumn storms before, ridden out many of them. However the force of this blow exceeded anything in my memory. All one could feel was the helplessness of uncontrol, over even his own person. While always the sound of that blasting wind, the battering of hail over and around us, continued.

  Were we being driven back towards the river as the gars had earlier fled? I could not be sure, but I believe that that was not so. The wind instead of battering us south was bearing us west and north—in the very direction we had been heading. Yet what could anyone make sure of in this chaos?

  How long that thundering, howling storm possessed us as prisoners I could not tell. The dark continued. In time I loosed my hold on Illo and strove to push aside those containers which, for all their travel lashing, had broken loose and thudded into our bodies with force enough to crack ribs or break bones, if they were to hit squarely.

  My first efforts were blind, more the instinctive reaction of one who had always lived on the edge of peril and whose body reflexes took over even when his thoughts were awry. Then I began to gain hold of myself as it came as a clear stroke to cut through my own haze of fear that, though my father had entered the wagon in good time, he was not joining me in doing what could be done to secure the lashings.

  I called him, and the roar, the thud of hail made so much sound I could not hear my own voice. Having done what I could to relieve us of immediate danger of being crushed, I crept on hands and knees through the thick dark to the fore of the wagon where I had seen him last come through the opening and turn to lash down the flap door.

  The wagon was still rocking forward, and I held one arm out to fend off anything which might yet be adrift. With my other hand I groped ahead, striving to find—to touch him.

  My fingers brushed trail leather, closed upon what could only be his upper arm. But he did not move at my touch, and there was a looseness—The wagon made another of its threatening side dips and his body slid, until I managed to reach and support it.

  He lay with his head heavy against my shoulder now, my questing hand felt stickiness draining down his face, and it was plain he was unconscious. Light—I must have light—!

  Now the wagon itself was filled with the smell of spilled saloil. We used the lanterns of the trek people rather than the very costly unit rods from off world. There was no place outside Portcity or one of the mine compounds to recharge those. To try to spark a light with oil free-flowing might well add a final disaster to our situation.

  I attempted to discover the extent of his hurts by touch alone, but I dared not examine him fully lest some unwary pressure of my hands might make his situation worse. Though I bent over him until our faces near touched I could not, in this uproar, hear his breathing, though my finger tips located the throat pulse and there was an answer there. Was it strong and steady as it should be? I doub
ted that. There was nothing to be done—nothing until the storm blew out or finished its play with us in some drastic fashion.

  Illo—a healer! She would know—could give aid—Where was she?

  The wagon lurched, tipped forward. I was jammed heavily against the fore part of the wagon, my father's inert weight lying half across me. The cargo! It had been well stowed. However, the lashings and bolted rods which held it were never meant to take this kind of punishment! I thought of two of the crates—they contained machines too heavy to transport by the miners' flitters and so consigned to our slower service. If those now broke loose they might even smash forward from the rear compartment to crush us. I struggled to free myself from under my father's body so that I might loose the door flap—make sure there was a small chance of escape.

  Only there was no time. Whatever hollow lay before us now was deeper, more precipitous than any ordinary dip in the plains. The tilt of the wagon assumed a sharper angle. Then—the fore part hit.

  We were stopped in the mad race which the wind had urged us into. Continued wind pressure now at the back might flip the whole transport entirely over. I held my breath waiting for that to happen.

  Dimly I became aware that the pounding of the hail had ceased, and though the wind continued to batter us it lacked the last ultimate fraction of strength to send us end over end. I drew a deep breath, my whole body tense as I tried hard to listen. Had that continual roar dulled my hearing, or was it that the storm had spent the worse of its attack and was dying at last?

  It was true that the wagon had stopped, slanted sharply towards the fore. As far as I could tell the cargo in the back was not battering down the two partitions between us. I shifted with care from under my father's weight, edging around his crumpled body to fumble with the lowest of the second flap lashings. Light—if we could only have a fraction of light!

  The flap edge gave and I dragged it up. What came into the battered mess of what had been our home was a grey twilight, but steadily growing stronger.

  My father lay beside me. There was a dark stream of blood down the side of his face spreading from the hair on the right side of his head. He was struggling to breathe, and now, with the dying of the storm fury, I could hear moans bubbling from his lips. Only there was red froth showing also at the corners of his mouth, spreading down his chin.

  Illo crawled forward. She lifted a hand to signal that I try to straighten him out, then edge back that she might see his hurts. Fortune had favored us in this much—we had her gift to depend upon now.

  Her finger tips touched very lightly that matted patch of hair. Having seen healers at their task I knew that, though she knelt with closed eyes, having to steady herself against the angle of the flooring with her other hand, she was "seeing" after their strange fashion the extent and nature of his injury. Then her fingers slid down to his chest which I had quickly laid bare and once more she traced back and forth with the slightest of touches.

  So much had the wind now died I was able to hear his labored breathing as well as those moans of pain. Now I heard the words I had so anxiously waited for:

  "He is badly injured." She did not try to spare me and for that I was very glad. "There is a crack in his skull, and his ribs are broken. He must be aided, and quickly—My pack—"

  She looked into the welter of stuff on the floor. I was busy with the rest of the lashing of the door flap. It was plain that broken bones could not be tended in this place. We would have to move him to where his body could lie straight and she would have the room to work upon him.

  The flap open, I looked out. The day was now light—though there was no sign of sun. Immediately facing me was a hillside down which washed streams of water as thick as my wrist. When I thrust head and shoulders out to see more, it was plain that the wagon had come to rest, almost as a stopper might be pounded into a bottle, in one of those grass-hidden gullies which are to be found in the plains to carry off the water after just such storms.

  That water which flowed down the walls was now rising about the fore of the wagon itself, fast enough to suggest that in a very short time it might wash high enough to lap into our present perch. We must get out and that quickly—but to try to carry an unconscious man through the rising flood was impossible. I made this report to Illo. She nodded, but did not raise her eyes from my father's face.

  I crawled around them as best I could and up the slope formed by the other part of the wagon. The latch on the second compartment yielded easily enough. Beyond, though a few of the smaller containers had jammed themselves to this end (doubtless most of their fragile contents was now useless), I had no barrier against my drawing myself along by hand holds on those same shelves to the hatch of the end cargo section.

  It all depended now on how well our restraints had worked there; I could open the hatch to find it barricaded by those machinery-filled crates which I could not shift by myself. Thumbing the lock-bar I discovered that just that had happened. There was a solid surface of crate facing me and no way from this side that I could hope to push it aside.

  Back I went, fear riding on me, for I knew that for my father it could well be a matter of time, very little time. I stopped in the first cargo compartment only long enough to shoulder a coil of rope, though I had very little hope of being able to use that as it could be done only if there were two or three men to bring full strength to bear.

  "No way out back there." Just as Illo had been frank with me, so did I return the same truth in my report.

  "We must hurry," was her only answer. That was one I had already guessed for myself.

  I dropped down into the rising water, the wagon holding the major push of the current away from me. Now I could clearly see what had happened. We had blown into quite a deep crevice. There was thick brush on both banks and sight of that gave me my first fraction of dim hope. It would depend entirely on how far down those roots reached and with what tenacity they clung to the ground in which they were now buried. If the streams of descending water loosened the soil, what I planned was near impossible.

  Though the brush resisted my climb, I had the wagon itself to pull against. The front wheels were nearly under the rising water now, but the back ones rested deeply up slope and I could drag myself through the whipping, briary stuff which laced my skin with a network of clawed scratches, until I reached the back of the wagon. There I loosened the latch and flung it wide open, to see that it was the largest and heaviest of the crates which jammed entrance at the other end of the section.

  Now I tested the brush, paying no attention to the saw-edged leaves, the thorns which cut into my hands. My choice was one near the lip of the gully. There was no water running there within a good space on either side, and, in spite of all my sudden jerks and longer, deliberate pulls, it did not stir. I would have to chance dependence upon its support.

  Back I crawled into the compartment, making fast one end of my rope with loper's knots which would hold even a maddened gar. A gar! Never in my life have I wanted anything as much as Witol or one of the herd to stand waiting at that moment. But they were gone—I hoped they had reached some shelter before the full fury of that wind and hail had struck.

  With the other end of the rope looped well about me I went again to my bush. Its inner trunk was thick, perhaps as large as my thigh, but I had to slash and cut with my belt knife to slice away the branches which were so close springing one could not reach that trunk without such clearing. Then the rope was around the trunk. I tested it the best I could, before I swung my whole weight upon it, throwing myself deliberately down slope. I brought up with a gasp of pain. Nor had that moved the crate barrier.

  "Loose the end for me."

  Gasping for breath I swung half way around, one hand on the up-tilted wheel to steady myself. Illo, her breeches plastered to her legs, her browned hands reaching out, had joined me before I knew it.

  Two of us might do it. We could but try. Now she was only another pair of hands as far as I was concerned, an addition of st
rength. At my nod as I still fought to get back my breath, she took from where they were tucked into her girdle a pair of gloves and drew them on. As a healer, I guessed, she could not risk the sensitivity and skill of her fingers in the rasping punishment mine had taken. That done, she did not hold back any from twisting the rope with closed fists. Above her I settled myself for another effort.

  "Now!"

  The quick jerk, to be followed by a pull in which I knew we put both our strength. It moved! Loosed out of its tight jam against the door the crate appeared to give easily now, and I saw, as I turned my head, the edge of the obstacle visible in the wagon opening—then it tottered, fell forward into the brush, splintering and breaking the mass of greenery with its weight.

  I threw the rope from me, was already up within the wagon bed, heading for the compartment door. Illo was on my heels as I pushed through the second section to reach our living quarters. There I found she had already accomplished what I would have believed impossible for her strength, for my father was a big man, spare of flesh perhaps, but heavy of bone. He had been straightened out upon a length of board she had loosened from the side of a bunk, for those could be dismantled at need for extra space. His body arranged as best she might, it was only necessary now for me to once more use the rope, setting one end of it with her hold, to bind my father's blanketed body to that board.