The Game of Stars and Comets

by Andre Norton

  I was ashamed at my own failure. At that moment my pride was cruelly hurt that I, who was supposed to be the toughened loper, had failed what was surely a good part of my duty. She had even pulled over me one of the gar fleece blankets. That I now hurled aside in my flare of temper at my own collapse.

  Yet that temper only raged for an instant. Something had awakened me; my plains knowledge assumed control. I could hear the water in the gully, though that did not sound to me as if it were now made by any rushing stream. Perhaps that storm born flood was subsiding.

  My loper's belt was about me, slung with those tools and aids any trekker must depend upon. Beside the stunner holster, the weight of my knife was against my hip as I stood up. My hand rested steadily about its hilt as I slowly turned my head from east to west, and then faced around to look north.

  There was the night wind, yes, but it did not sing tonight through the long grass which had been so beaten down by the storm. Nor did it carry with it that strange odor which had been a part of it before the coming of the storm. If some scavenger prowled beyond the reach of our fire, the visitor made no sound.

  For a moment or two I had a sudden leap of hope—the gars! Had Witol managed to find his way back, perhaps heading as herd leader the others of the team? I whistled softly that call which the massive beast always answered if he was within range of hearing.

  There was no snorting, no sound of those hooves thudding on the plains ground. Yet there was something—a sound, a feeling had brought me out of sleep and now held me tense and listening. If my father—I knew that my hard-learned knowledge of the loper's world was nearly only the beginning of a child's first reading tape compared to his. I had seen him so alerted many times in the past, and always there had been excellent reason.

  Sight was not going to serve me beyond the lantern glow; smell and sound had brought me nothing—yet. I crossed to where Illo huddled, stooped and drew the stunner from her lax grasp. With that at ready, saving my own for an emergency, I began a slow circuit of our improvised camp, stopping every few paces to listen, to stare out into the country with its moon-painted patches of light and dark.

  Nothing to be detected. The grass was so heavy with water that it was beaten towards the ground. Anything trying to reach us through that would have made both sound and movement which I could easily pick up. There remained the stream. I unhooked my night torch from my belt. Its charges must be carefully conserved as there was only one small box of them which I had managed to drag away from the flood. Still I thumbed the control button on high and aimed the wide beam of frosty light down into the gully.

  The weight of the wagon, its forepart pushed by the stream, had broken one of the embedded rear wheels, so now it lay on its side. Were my father whole and the gars to hand, its repair and return to the trek would have been a hard job but not an impossible one. Under the present circumstances I could not hope to draw the vehicle out again.

  That river which had been such a force had greatly subsided. Though its surface was still opaque with silt and muddy swirls, the current had lessened and was no longer high enough to give cover to any such beast as had threatened us.

  Though the dropping of the water would certainly have partly uncovered the bulk of the creature's body were it still inert from the ray, there was no serrated, scaled back showing. The thing had either been borne well down stream, or had swum away of its own accord. To my most searching survey nothing lay there but the wreck of the wagon and the steadily lessening flow of water.

  I had made a circle about our camp without result. Yet—I knew. There was something which had awakened me, something out there somewhere—waiting—

  I thought of what my mother's kinswoman had said—Shadow touched. Oh, I had heard the expression before but then it had not meant—me. What had happened when the death had come to the northern holdings? Why had a child here, some infants there—all second generation—escaped whatever doom it was which had blasted whole settlements out of existence? Why should we not remember?

  Once more I reached back in my own mind—No, there was only riding the gar under the sun, my father tramping beside the beast. I could not even clearly remember him; the gar was far more vivid in my mental picture.

  Was that because riding was strange and wonderful, an exciting thing for a small boy? The settlements and holdings used gars, yes—but those were lesser in size, in strength, in all that which might impress a small child, than the animals a loper trained and lived with most of his life.

  I thought of my father's constant interest in the deserted and ruined sites where the Shadows had struck—risking his life to explore such. Why did men speak of "Shadows"? If there were no survivors who could report on the nature of the danger—then who had given them that name?

  Again I searched memory and could find nothing to answer my own question. I had heard of "Shadows" as a danger, as doom and death, all my life—still, in spite of all my father's searching I had never been told why that unknown menace in the north had been so named. It was as if there was some inward flinching away in me which kept me from such speculation, a barrier—

  As I slipped once more around our camp I not only searched the night-covered land for the reason for my waking, my uneasiness, but another part of my mind was busy—for the first time I could honestly remember—in asking those questions. Three times I went around just within the farthest gleam of the lanterns.

  Instead of being able to reassure myself that nothing waited in the water-drenched, moonlit land, my feeling that we were under observation of some sort grew deeper. I found myself hunching my shoulders against my will, as if I expected a knife to come whistling through the air to strike into my flesh, a blaster to crisp me, skin and bone. I waited for a long space each time I stood at the edge of the gully, my torch beam striking down at the water which was reduced so rapidly now in its flow it was as if the ground itself was a sponge soaking up that fluid in huge quantities.

  At last I turned aside from my self-appointed sentry's beat and went directly to where my father lay, covered with one of the blankets. In the light which was less glaring than my torch, his face was drawn, the bones seeming to stand out beneath the skin as if in these short hours some deadly illness had eaten through his resistance. And—His eyes were wide open. Not only open but aware. They met mine with intelligence, a compulsion which brought me to my knees beside him. I might have at that moment been no older than the small boy in my memory of the past.

  Illo had washed the blood from his face, bandaged his wounds. The blanket was pulled up to his throat, masking the broken body. Pain must have made those lines so deep there now, but he had forced it away from him, under his control. I read that, and I do not know how I did it.

  I saw his lips move with effort. There was a beading of sweat across what forehead the bandage did not cover. Driven by what lay in his eyes I leaned very low above him so my ear was close to those struggling lips. "North—to Mungo—" his words were a mere wisp of sound. "North—I—I—must—lie—in Mungo. Swear this, swear it!" Somehow he had gathered the strength to make those last four words ring out, above the tortured whisper, clear and strong as he might have given the signal for the gars to be on the move. There was a bubble of red again showing at a corner of his mouth. He coughed thickly, rackingly. The bubble burst, and blood spewed forth. But his eyes never loosed their hold on mine. His lips worked again—but there was only that terrible, tearing cough which brought out gouts of blood instead of the words.

  "I swear—!" There was no other answer which could ease him in this time; that I understood.

  The bright glint in his eyes still held strong and clear for a long moment after we made that pact. I reached beneath the edge of the blanket, found his hand and held it. In him there yet remained some strength, for his fingers tightened in my hold, gripping mine with a force I would not have believed he was still able to summon.

  He did not try to speak again. But he kept his eyes open and on mine and we held th
at grasp. Was it for long? There was no measurement of time. I am not sure when it was that his head moved a fraction on the folded blanket we had used to pillow it, when he looked beyond me at something else. For that he did see something in that last moment I shall always swear. What it was remained his secret, but I think in some manner it was a comfort, for the pain lines lessened, and there was a new peace—an expression I realized I had never seen on my father's calm face before. He was in that moment younger, eager, a man I did not know, that it had never been for me to know.

  I still sat by him as the moon dropped low in the night sky, but what I guarded now was nothing—an outworn coat, a forgotten and unneeded garment. My father was gone and left in me an emptiness which grew deeper and wider, making a space into which I thought I might even fall and never climb out of again. I had had no life which had not held him always there—what could I do now?

  I started. The touch on my shoulder then was as if a blaster had seared across unshielded flesh.

  "He has taken his own way, that lay in his mind from the beginning."

  I looked up at the girl, my anger hot enough to burn away the uncertainty of moments earlier.

  "He had strength—he would not have—done what you say!" I denied her words fiercely. For I had seen once or twice in my roving life those who died of what seemed minor illnesses or superficial hurts because they had no wish to live. My father was not to be numbered among them. I think at that moment my rage boiled up in me, fed by the hurt of my own loss, might have led me to strike out physically at her.

  "He was tired—very tired, and he was one of those who know—"

  She did not draw away from me. Her face and voice still held the calm of her calling. That serenity began to react on me as it always did when one came in contact with the healers.

  "One who knows what?" I demanded.

  "It is given to some of us to understand and know when the great change draws near. He was a man who has been driven many years by that which he could not accept—he had already begun to believe that he must reach beyond our life to understand."

  Her words dropped into my mind one by one as one might cast pebbles into a pool and watch the ripples spread outward to the edge of the surface and then break and go. That my father was a driven man—yes, that I had always known since I had grown into the age when one's world does not center only upon one's self as it does for a child. That he was ridden ever by the puzzle which remained beyond his solving, yes, that, too, was true. But that he would surrender—No! I bit back the harsh outburst which I might have used to greet that. What remained to think on now—at this present—was not that he had died—doubtless of such hurts not even off-world medical wonders could heal—but that he had asked a promise of me and I was sworn to fulfill it.

  How was that task to be accomplished? I did not even know for sure in what direction Mungo's lay or how far away. But that I would do this—that I must.

  "I have sworn to him that he will lie in Mungo's—or what is still left of it," I told her. Somehow I shook my mind free of the frozen grip upon it, began to think of ways and means. Days of travel might lie ahead. I had no transport—even if I could raise the mine or the port on the com, I knew that I could get no one who would be willing to help.

  Very well, alone I would do what I must. So I set to work. But when she saw what I brought out of the jumble of supplies Illo came forward, and, without a word, set about helping me. My father's body we sealed into the protect suit he had used all these years for exploring the Shadow-blasted ruins. There was a keg of plastaseal in the broken wagon, part of the shipment for the mine, used to repair their shelters there. Now it proved the outward seal, the encoffining for the body, until even the white suit was completely hidden by a swiftly stiffening green casing which under the sun became dura-hard.

  Just as I had half thought out the transport for him alive, so did I now follow the same idea for him dead. The planks from the bunks I also sealed together with what was left of the plasta—forming a platform on which the enclosed body could be safely lashed.

  I worked away most of the day, dealing with what supplies and tools I might use or improvise. Nor was I aware, as I worked, of anything but the job at hand, driving myself to its doing. Only when I had fastened the last rope and smeared the remaining drops of plasta over those knots, did I stagger to the side of the fire and take in shaking hands the bowl of food Illo held out to me. I was halfway through gulping its contents when I heard the sound which brought me to my feet, the food dribbling to the ground as the bowl turned over in my grasp. Faint and far away, yes—! I had no doubts that that was what I had heard.

  Now I dropped the bowl entirely, put fingers to my lips to aid in a distance piercing whistle. Gars—that could have been the bellow of some wild herd bull, for there were such, drifters from the ruined holdings. Only, once a team was well united, it was the nature of the great beasts to keep with their masters in a strong relationship, and our gars had been unusually united, even for their breed.

  That they could have traced us over the wildness where the stream had driven the wagon, that, too, was not unknown. I had heard tales of gars who had traveled from one holding to another seeking the breeder with whom they had been identified in training as calves. That was why few of them could ever be sold away from their trainers.

  It was close to sunset, but there was light across the land. I fumbled for my distance glasses after I had whistled for the second time. Now I could pick up greyish specks in the distance—three of them. Where the others were—remembering the fury of the storm, the beating of the hail, perhaps I could expect no more than those.

  Illo moved in beside me. "Yours?"

  "I will wager it. But there are only three—"

  "Not enough to raise the wagon," she commented.

  I shook my head, my attention all for those distant dots which were growing larger by the moment. They were moving fast, at a trot, their horned heads now and then dipping groundwards as if they scented some trail. But there was no mistaking that larger bulk in the lead now—Witol! One who followed was his mate—Dru—and the third—he was a youngster whom we had put to the yoke only this season, a calf sired by Witol—Wodru.

  With the gars I could well carry out my plan. Only, as I turned back to the fire confident that they would soon be shouldering their way to our camp, I remembered for the first time Illo and her own quest. I was bound to the task my father had set for me, but as trekmaster he had given her passage with us. The cargo we carried for the mine would be no problem—I could use the com as a set signal for the men there and give in that fashion a pick-up point so that they could find what might be salvaged. Illo's transportation was another matter. I must now take on the responsibility of seeing her safely to her own destination.

  "Will you go on?" I asked bluntly. "Have you any map or guide?"

  She looked up at me over her shoulder, for she had gone back to kneel by the fire and add to it some of the brush culled from beneath the growth where the rain had not left it sodden.

  "Trekmaster's bond?" she held out her hands to the small flames. "No, I do not hold you to it, Bart s'Lorn. Such can be dissolved by mutual consent."

  "I do not consent," I told her sharply. "With the gars we can pack enough supplies surely to see you to where you would go—"

  "Very well then. Suppose I say now that I go to Mungo's—"

  "Why?" I challenged her. "Because you know that I must journey there? But that is folly. I can see you to whatever holding—"

  "Holding?" she interrupted me. "There is no holding or settlement—save that of the off-worlders—this far north—now."

  "But you said—you had call, that you were needed. The off-worlders—?"

  Her lips curved in a faint smile. "Would they drink my potions, allow my hands to draw any illness from them? They have no belief in such. Yes, I was called—but not by any messenger such as can be seen or heard. I told you—I am Shadow touched. As your father there is a need
in me to know—to discover what I cannot remember. So—Mungo's fell to the Shadow doom as did Voor's Grove. Therefore, perhaps I can learn the nature of what I wish there as well as in the place from which I came."

  I did not like it. Still it cannot be that any man says 'no' to a healer who declares that she has a call for aid. That she could not help my father was no reflection on her skill—for there are hurts past any healing. It was true that if I did not have to linger on my own journey to see her to her destination it would be the better. Still I was not satisfied within myself, though I could raise no adequate argument against such a journey.

  The gars reached our camp and then I saw a thing which I had witnessed but once before in my life, for the three beasts, led by Witol went to the crude sled on which my father's body lay in the coffining I had devised and there stood for a space, Witol at the head, Dru on his right, Wodru on the left. The great team leader raised his three horned head and gave a cry which was not his usual deep-throated bellow, rather a keening which I have heard from those of his species when one of their own herd or team lay dead.