‘Yes! The way the sky is around the earth. The way heaven is around the stars!’
Steve considered this abstraction, trying to make some sense of it. ‘I see. He’s like the other, uhh – person you say lives in the sky – Mo-Town.’
‘He is greater than Mo-Town. She is the mother of the Plainfolk. Talisman is Ruler of All.’
Steve nodded again. ‘Got it. Are they, uhh – related?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Snow. ‘Talisman is both the son and the father of Mo-Town.’
Steve frowned. ‘But that doesn’t make sense.’
‘Not to you,’ said Mr Snow. ‘Not now, anyway. But before you laugh off the whole idea just remember he saved your ass. Think about that.’
‘I will,’ said Steve, with as much sincerity as his wounded face would allow. He had already earmarked the conversation as eminently forgettable. How sad, he reflected that two such amiable ostensibly bright guys could cherish such batty notions. On the other hand, it made life a whole lot easier for the Federation. While the Plainfolk were waiting for their great mother and father in the sky to come to their aid on wings of thunder, the Trail-Blazers would proceed to take them apart with the aid of some good old-fashioned firepower. Still, it was odd about the way that stone hammer had exploded…
Steve mentally pigeonholed the problem and tuned back onto the two wordsmiths. ‘Does the fact that I’ve got this, uhh, Talisman rooting for me mean that your friend Motor-Head will be off my back from now on?’
Cadillac shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. Now that you have both bitten the arrow it means that he can challenge you in single combat.’
‘He could not do that before,’ explained Mr Snow. ‘In his eyes, you had no standing. But now you are a warrior…’ He spread his palms.
‘Terrific,’ said Steve. ‘What are the chances of him pulling permanent guard duty at your furthest lookout point?’
‘Slim,’ replied Mr Snow.
‘But – can’t you tell him to lay off?’ said Steve anxiously. ‘I thought you ran things round here.’
‘Ahh, Rolling-Stone is the chief clan elder. There are certain areas where the clan seeks my advice but…’ Mr Snow shrugged.
‘So what do I do now?’ asked Steve.
The old wordsmith savoured his reply. ‘Well… you can either start practising your knife-work – or start praying to Talisman. Preferably both.’ He uncrossed his legs, patted Steve on the shoulder and got up.
‘I’ll see if I can get you a blade,’ said Cadillac. ‘Meanwhile it might be better to stay indoors.’ He followed Mr Snow out.
‘Make it a long one,’ Steve shouted, as they went through the door curtain. ‘Or give me my rifle back – if you’ve still got it.’ Some chance. Still, it was worth a try. Steve cursed inwardly. What a situation. After all he’d been through. All that mumbo jumbo – only to learn that the biggest ape on the campus was out there waiting for a pretext to jump on his bones. Christopher Columbus!
When they were safely out of sight of the hut, Cadillac and Mr Snow slapped hands, pushed each other and fell about laughing until tears of joy and pain ran down their wounded, swollen jaws.
‘Did you see his face?!’ choked Mr Snow. He collapsed in a new burst of laughter, clutching his cheeks. ‘Oh, dear, this is doing me no good at all!’
‘Do you think we ought to tell Motor-Head to lay off?’
‘No leave it. Let Talisman look after his own. Oh, dear… our Mr Brickman takes things so seriously. And he’s so blind! Do you think they’re all like that?’ Mr Snow wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Yes… I’m going to be really sorry to lose him.’
FIFTEEN
With the aid of a daily application of Mr Snow’s antiseptic red leaf mash, the wounds in Steve’s face healed rapidly, leaving pale, cross-shaped scars. In the days that followed the ceremony, Steve found that many of the M’Calls who had cold-shouldered him had adopted a more relaxed attitude. From being a despised, disarmed intruder he became an object of good-natured curiosity and for the first time began to attract a small crowd of followers who, when challenged, revealed with an engaging shyness that they wanted to ask him questions. Not that, as it turned out, they were particularly interested in the answers, for they would soon be forgotten. They just wanted to hear him speak.
Along with this newly-acquired social acceptability, Steve was accorded the additional privilege of an invitation to Mr Snow’s hut where, in the company of Cadillac, he was introduced to rainbow grass. Because Buck McDonnell ran what was called a ‘tight train’, the whispers about its availability and covert use by some trail-hands had not reached Steve’s ears while aboard The Lady.
Steve accepted the proffered pipe and sniffed it cautiously before taking an experimental puff. Despite the use of grass by Trackers on overground expeditions, smoking was not a permitted social activity within the Federation; indeed, to most people, the idea would have seemed absurd. Since cigarettes did not exist, the need for them simply did not arise.
The first intake of smoke made Steve cough and retch. The second, taken down into the lungs, nearly choked him but induced an agreeable lightheadedness; the third turned his ears into wings. The fourth prompted Mr Snow to take the pipe away from him.
‘Hey, hey, hey, slow down. What are you trying to do – start a fire?’
Steve giggled lopsidedly. ‘Sorry.’
‘So you should be,’ said Mr Snow severely. ‘You and that other sonofabitch burned a good two acres of this stuff. We’re all still very sore about that.’
Having a hole punched through his face produced another, less desirable, side-effect. Night-Fever, one of the dozen or so female Mutes who took it in turn to bring Steve his food, began to favour him with hot-eyed glances. She had woven his broken pieces of arrow into a necklace made of thin plaited strips of buffalo hide and, after presenting it to him, had taken to squatting for hours on end outside his hut. Since, in terms of looks, Steve rated her near the bottom of an unprepossessing heap, her thinly concealed desires were an unwelcome development which, added to the lurking danger of an equally unwelcome attack upon his person by Motor-Head, should have prompted him to put his plan for building a hang-glider to Cadillac, but he did nothing. He drifted, gripped by a kind of mental languor, mesmerised by the luminous eyes that had met his across the clearing; his waking hours and his dreams haunted by evanescent images of the face he had glimpsed in the firelight; images that aroused feelings which he was unable to put into words because – like ‘freedom’ – they had been deliberately omitted from the Federation dictionary.
Escape was still Steve’s ultimate objective but all his plans and his byzantine schemes to manipulate his captors had been put on the back burner. His primary task now was to find out who that face belonged to. He was plagued by an urgent need to assuage the feelings its mysterious beauty had inspired. Steve had, quite simply, fallen in love but, as he had not heard the word mentioned until his conversation with Mr Snow and still did not properly comprehend what it meant in practical human terms, he was fated to remain –in the words of a song from the Old Time – bewitched, bothered and bewildered.
Who was she? And where was she? Steve was pretty sure he had explored the whole area in and around the settlement and encountered, at one time or another, virtually the whole clan but, since the night he had bitten the arrow, he had not caught even a glimpse of his elusive quarry. Since being captured he had learned enough about the Plainfolk society to know that she was not a visitor. The fact that she was being kept apart from the other M’Calls must mean that she was either regarded as something special by the clan or she was being kept hidden because of him.
Or both.
What was it the M’Calls did not want him to discover?
As he had promised, Cadillac duly furnished Steve with a long-bladed hunting knife. Not the usual Mute sharp iron, but standard Trail-Blazer issue. At first Steve thought it was his own but, when he took a closer look, he found the initi
als ‘L.K.N.’ etched on the handle: Lou Kennedy Naylor, who had been inexplicably attacked by Fazetti and brought down over the forest. Steve’s hopes that the M’Calls might also have kept bits of Naylor’s Skyhawk and possibly his own received a fresh boost. ‘Thanks.’ He hefted the blade. ‘Aren’t you worried I might kill somebody?’
Cadillac pursed his lips and shrugged. ‘Unless you killed in single combat your death would be inevitable, slow and terrible. A wasted gesture. Where would be the profit in that?’
‘When you put it that way, none, but –’ Steve hesitated. ‘Didn’t Mr Snow tell everybody that Talisman’s shadow was upon me? Doesn’t that mean I’m under his protection?’
‘Yes, it does,’ admitted Cadillac.
‘Then if he really exists and is as powerful as you guys say he is, nothing can happen to me.’ Steve flipped the knife jauntily into the air and caught it again by the handle. ‘He saved me from death in the cropfields, and from Motor-Head’s hammer, so –’
Cadillac’s eyes gleamed as he grasped the thrust of Steve’s argument. ‘He may save you again – but only if you conduct yourself like a warrior.’
Steve watched Cadillac walk away. There was no doubt about it, the two mouthpieces for the M’Calls had a whole bagful of great exit lines. They probably sat around rehearsing them in Mr Snow’s hut. He reflected on Cadillac’s veiled warning. These guys and their gods. They tried to convince you that everything was already worked out, every move preordained by someone living way up beyond the clouds, but they always left themselves a way out in case things didn’t happen as predicted.
There was only one power that worked. Manpower. And the Federation knew how to organise that. When they had won back the overground and wiped out the Mutes they would change the face of the earth. The forces of Nature at the heart of the so-called Mute magic would be observed, analysed, understood, and harnessed. The Sky Voices that supposedly gave Mr Snow his marching orders would find that no one was listening; Mo-Town and Talisman would be reduced to a couple of laugh-lines in the history archives. Peripheral data. There would be no place for any of that crap in the New America the Federation was going to build. Just hard work and good living. That was the difference between the smoke-filled fantasies of the Mutes and the vision that fired the Trackers. Thanks to the genius of the First Family, the blue-sky world was within their grasp: could be won by the strong and the brave. The bones of the Mutes would be buried under the gleaming cities that would rise from the empty sunlit plains. Yes…
Still, it was odd the way that stone hammer exploded…
Deciding that it was better to be prepared than spend his time trying to avoid the threatened confrontation with Motor-Head, Steve borrowed a machete and cut himself a quarterstaff which he carried with him everywhere. He constructed a dummy opponent from branches and grass and practised daily until he could wield the staff as effortlessly as he had in the Flight Academy. His use of the staff attracted the attention and interest of the M’Call Bears, and Steve soon found himself giving lessons to a class that grew rapidly to around fifty, and included the fearsome Motor-Head. The big Mute scorned the protective pads of wood and leather that Steve had insisted his pupils must make and wear and stuck with his own stone decorated helmet and body armour.
In their practice bouts, Steve found Motor-Head fearless, apparently impervious to pain, and a fast learner. What he lacked in technique he made up for in speed and strength and it was only Steve’s arduously acquired superior skill and mental discipline that kept him out of serious trouble. His encounters with Motor-Head acquired an extra edge; became needle matches which, despite Steve’s rule that practice bouts should end after landing two strokes in the alloted ‘kill’ zones, were only terminated when Motor-Head was brought, temporarily, to his knees. It was clear that the powerfully muscled Bear did not intend to give up until he had regained his position as paramount warrior and had beaten Steve into the ground.
Steve considered taking a dive to placate Motor-Head’s pride but, on this occasion, his stubborn streak won over his natural guile. Since his capture, his corn-coloured hair had grown out of its natural crew-cut shape and was hanging onto the nape of his neck and over his ears. Siezed by an unreasoning defiance, he got Night-Fever to weave a thin plait in his hair interlaced with a strip of the blue solar cell fabric, and each time he beat Motor-Head, he added another ribboned plait. Steve knew he was asking for trouble by baiting Motor-Head with such a provocative coiffure but he was confident that his skill with the quarterstaff allied to his superior intelligence and sixth sense could outsmart this formidable but half-witted fighting machine.
His instruction of the Bears in the use of the quarterstaff enabled him to make a more objective assessment of their learning ability. Like all Trackers, Steve had been brought up to believe that all lumpheads were dummies. Since meeting Cadillac and Mr Snow he knew this was not the case, but he had had first hand experience of the average Mute’s inability to remember. The mistake he and the rest of the Federation had made was in equating a Mute’s faulty memory with low intelligence. Steve came to realise that his captors could not only absorb information; they could retain it. What was missing was the information retrieval system. Their brains were like computers into which data could be fed but which had no print-out facility. The Mutes could put two and two together but they couldn’t tell you the answer was four because the link between the memory centre and the speech centre kept breaking down. In some, the link was so intermittent as to be virtually non-existent, in others – like Three Degrees – the down-time on the memory link was minimal, or limited to specific areas of knowledge. The old Mute had thus been able to acquire his wood-working skills and – as he went on to demonstrate –recognise Steve on some days but not know who the hell he was on the next. The limited specific memory facility enabled, for example, the M’Call Bears to acquire and retain fighting and hunting skills but even this, it appeared, was prone to the odd line fault. Which, Steve imagined, could be bad news if it happened in the middle of a rumble over your home turf.
There was a third memory factor which Steve had noticed but did not fully understand. When he had watched Three Degrees make the pair of crutches, he had noted how Cadillac’s presence had aided the old lumphead in his task. Somehow, through the odd spoken word or his physical proximity, Cadillac had helped complete the memory circuits when Three Degrees hands had faltered. Steve had already seen enough to convince him that the clan could interreact without the need for words. He had ascribed this ability to a sense of awareness – a word-concept that had come to him out of the blue. When he had smoked grass with the two wordsmiths his vision had been affected to the point where he began to think he could see some kind of aura, or higher self, extending beyond the limits of their physical bodies. Steve’s brain began to flounder among such unfamiliar concepts. Hallucinogenic drugs, heightened states of consciousness and sensory distortion were totally unknown within the Federation. Did the two wordsmiths play some shadowy role in which, with their superior intelligence, they acted as a kind of control mechanism for the clan? A group memory. A… Steve searched for the word, trying to reach for something he had been aware of during his trip along the rainbow road. A kind of… overmind? Or were they merely the channel for a power that came from somewhere else?
Interesting ideas but also dangerous ones. He would have to observe his principle captors more carefully; more clinically. It would not enhance his career prospects to peddle such half-baked notions on his return to the Federation. Facts, Brickman. That’s what they need back home. That’s all that counts. Stay alive, note everything you see, score a few points for the guys that powered down, then hit the road.
But only after you’ve found that blue-eyed Mute…
In the middle of all this, Steve woke one night to find that Cadillac’s sleeping furs were empty. The next night, the young wordsmith again slept elsewhere but joined him for breakfast in the morning as usual. Steve waited for Cadillac to say someth
ing but the young Mute made no reference to the change in his sleeping habits. His silence on the subject merely served to arouse Steve’s curiosity.
On the third evening Steve received his second invitation to smoke some grass with the two wordsmiths. Later, after his mind had roamed the rainbow world, and he had heard the same distant voices yet again and understood many things, Cadillac helped him stagger back to the hut they shared. Steve mumbled his thanks as the young wordsmith rolled him into bed then opened his eyes just in time to see Cadillac slipping out of the hut. Pushing aside his furs, Steve shuffled quickly on his hands and knees over to the doorway and pushed his head out of the flap. He saw Cadillac lit briefly by the glow from the dying fire, walking in the opposite direction to that in which Mr Snow’s hut lay.
Summoning up his powers of concentration, Steve willed his brain back into one piece, rose unsteadily to his feet and headed after Cadillac as he was swallowed up by the night. There was no moon. Beyond the last of the dying camp fires the darkness became impenetrable. Steve stopped, made an effort to listen, thought he heard Cadillac moving down a leaf-covered trail, followed, tripped over a tree root, crashed to the ground and lay there – wondering with increasing detachment why he was so concerned by Cadillac’s night games. Whatever curiosity he had started out with was gently wafted away on a roseate cloud of indifference. He fell asleep to wake, some hours later, beneath a drifting blanket of ground mist in the deep purple greyness that preceded the dawn.
Chilled to the marrow, his face wet with dew, Steve stumbled back to the hut, frantically beating his arms and body. Sucking in breath through trembling jaws, Steve slipped gratefully between his furs. They were warm. His brain must have iced up because it took him a few seconds to figure out why. As the answer came, a bare arm snaked over his chest and a body that was hard in some places and soft in others eased its length against his. The owner’s chin nestled against his shoulder, their breath warmed his ear. Steve lay there not daring to look round, not daring to move in case he woke the intruder.
Cloud Warrior Page 25
