‘Wheel-boats take them away.’
‘I know that. I mean when they get to the Fire-Pits of Beth-Lem.’
Blue-Thunder shrugged. ‘No one has ever spoken of this.’
One of the posse hurried over to where they sat and placed something in Blue-Thunder’s palm. He looked at it then pulled it out between his fingertips until both arms were fully extended. It was a hair-thin metal thread, a filament aerial similar to the one inside Steve’s knife – except that this one had become detached from its spool. ‘This too was made by sand-burrowers. What can you say of it?’
Steve chose his words carefully. He was 99 per cent certain that Blue-Thunder didn’t have a clue about what he was holding but he couldn’t be sure. ‘It is a thing fashioned by those of the High Craft. By itself it is nothing but when fixed to another device it sends words through the air – like birds flying over the mountains to places we cannot see.’
Blue-Thunder ran his eyes slowly along the wire then wound it carefully into a small coil. ‘So… there are those who speak and those who listen.’ The Mute warrior rose to his feet. ‘And they tread on our turf…’ He handed the wire to Steve. ‘Give me your thoughts, Cloud-Warrior. Do they talk of us?’
Steve had a sudden premonition that things were about to go horribly wrong. He shrugged. ‘If it worries you, let’s go find them and ask.’
As he spoke, they heard a shrill, bird-like call. A signal that Mutes used to communicate with each other when hunting. Steve remembered the first time he had heard it – when he had been chased through the woods after discovering Clearwater.
More footprints had been found. The last marcher had swept a branch across the trail behind him but not carefully enough. Blue-Thunder beckoned Steve to stay on his heels then cupped his hands around his mouth to shape the high-pitched bark of the coyote. The sound echoed back and forth between the surrounding hills as the Bears began running towards the south.
Steve’s dilemma increased. The filament aerial was proof that the group they were pursuing were not the red-skins Blue-Thunder hoped to find. The Mutes were hot on the trail of the MX back-up squad sent to aid Steve and act as the channel for his reports to Karlstrom. Their capture could wreck the whole operation and ruin his own byzantine schemes. But there was no way he could throw the M’Call Bears off the scent. The trail might run dry but the Mutes were no amateurs. Hunting was in their blood. He thought back to his last transmission. He had passed on the date on which the clan was due to rendezvous with the wheel-boats. If their quarry was the back-up squad, they must have decided that the M’Calls and their neighbours would be totally preoccupied with the preparations for the big event. As a consequence they had gotten careless. A bad move. The overground was an unforgiving place.
There were only two things he could do to impede the chase. He could try and slow down the pace by generally dragging his heels but this was bound to look suspicious. He had already run a great deal further without experiencing any difficulty and Blue-Thunder had been with him on both occasions. The alternative was to find some way to alert the Trackers, breakers, or whoever they were, to the fact that they were being hunted. But how? He didn’t have a rifle, or a crossbow that could be accidentally discharged. All he had was his quarterstaff and his… and his knife. Of course! What a dummy! He was becoming as forgetful as his hosts! All he had to do was key in a message to warn the back-up squad that a Mute posse might be on their tail. If they weren’t mexicans then it would be tough shit on whoever was out there. Steve felt a lot better. Yeah… that was it. Simple. But he couldn’t do it while everybody was looking. He would have to try and unstick himself from Blue-Thunder, or wait until after dark.
By nightfall, Steve had not managed to distance himself from the posse despite the fact that he had lagged behind complaining of a sudden, painful stitch, and had later developed a twisted ankle. Blue-Thunder had slowed down until he felt better then, when he simply dropped out, he ordered two pairs of warriors to take turns in carrying him along with his arms draped over their shoulders. Realising his ruse had failed, Steve made a dramatic recovery and carried on unaided.
When they finally stopped, Steve did not have to feign exhaustion and, to add the final touch to a day when everything had seemed to go wrong, it started to rain steadily. No fires were lit, there was no moon, and a dense blanket of cloud obscured the stars. The M’Call warriors sat huddled together in groups, morosely chewing on dried meat twists or fruit rings. They didn’t mind the rain but they preferred it during the day. It was the combination of no fire and no stars that was the real dampener.
For journeys that took them away from home for several days, the M’Calls carried light closely-woven mats which, when unrolled, measured approximately nine feet by six. The mat was folded down its length and the two edges of one the short ends had been sewn together to form a large hood that could be worn over the head and shoulders while using the bottom third of the mat to sit on or, alternatively, you could lie stretched out inside it with your feet in the closed end. Used in combination with their travelling furs, it provided a reasonably waterproof shelter.
Despite the temporary gloom caused by the absence of a starry sky, Blue-Thunder was quietly confident that they would catch up with the red-skins by the middle of the following day. Steve realised that this was his last chance. He rolled himself into his furskin, wriggled inside the folded straw mat and lay there listening to the raindrops plopping noisily and endlessly onto the leaves of the surrounding trees. The cold and the damp began to seep into his bones. Rain – something that generations of Trackers had never encountered – had lost all its novelty value during his previous stay with the M’Calls. It was one feature of the overground he could do without.
By the time everybody was asleep, the darkness was so complete Steve could barely see his hand in front of his face. It didn’t matter. The keyboard function switches and the liquid crystal display were illuminated automatically by means of a sensor which measured the surrounding level of light when the hidden transceiver was exposed.
Sliding carefully out of his furskin, Steve picked his way around the sleeping bodies than dropped his pants and squatted down in the middle of a waist-high patch of undergrowth. If anyone came looking for him his reason for being there would be immediately obvious. He couldn’t be sure but he was fairly confident that there were no Mutes laws or customs that forbade nocturnal defecation.
Pulling the knife from its sheath, Steve searched with his fingers for the two hidden catches and pressed down simultaneously. Once, twice, three times. Nothing happened. The wooden hand-grip covering the transceiver remained stubbornly in place. Steve turned the handle over in the darkness and tried again. Nope… the catches weren’t there. He had been holding it correctly the first time. He turned it back over and tried again. The triple-action pressure lock stayed shut.
What the fuck was going on? It was virtually impossible for it to jam. A sudden chill thought struck him. Rapidly locating the place where Lou Kennedy Naylor’s initials had been stamped into the wood, Steve traced the letters with his thumbnail. What he thought was an ‘N’ turned out to be an ‘R’. The initials were not LKN but SRB. Uhh, Christopher… Someone had done a quick switch. The knife he now held in his hand was his own – which had been taken from him after being captured the previous year.
Steve checked the initials once again just to make sure then put the knife away and cursed silently. Apart from the small initials – which only wingmen were officially permitted to apply – there was nothing to distinguish one knife from another. It was just a standard-issue item. He tried to figure out when the substitution could have taken place and the most likely person to have done it. Night-Fever would have had the most opportunity – while he was bathing, dressing, or lying asleep. In the end he decided that the question of ‘who’ and ‘when’ was irrelevant. The important thing was ‘why’. He had told Mr Snow that he had been given a communication device – had even offered to show him how it w
orked. Did they suspect him of using it? Worse, had they observed him doing so? If not, what chance did he stand of getting it back? Three questions that were impossible to answer. Shit, shit and triple shit. Steve hitched up his pants and went back to bed.
Blue-Thunder was sitting up waiting for him. ‘Does something trouble you, Cloud-Warrior?’
‘No, everything’s fine.’ Steve rolled himself into his fur and straw cocoon and got his head down. Couldn’t be better…
Manhattan-Transfer, the forward scout wriggled back through the grass to a point where he could be seen by the main party and raised eight fingers.
Steve’s heart sank. There was no doubt in his mind now. It was the back-up squad. He mentally steeled himself for the coming encounter. It was too late to switch sides now. He glanced back over his shoulder at the horizon. The band of deep orange along the horizon had already turned yellow along its bottom edge but the sun had not yet stepped through the eastern door. In the eagerness to resume the chase, the Mutes had started out at first light and had caught up with their quarry sooner than expected.
Turning back, he saw Blue-Thunder confer with his four pack-leaders. From his gestures it was clear he was ordering them to encircle the ‘red-skins’ position. Steve was attached as a supernumerary to Blue-Thunder’s pack. Thirteenth man. The number held no special significance for Mutes but for Trackers the connotation with bad luck had been carried over from the pre-Holocaust era even though the basic concept of luck – good or bad – was frowned on by the First Family.
The pack-leaders stole away with their respective warriors. Around him, Blue-Thunder’s Bears drew their long knives and armed their crossbows. Steve drew his bladed quarterstaff. He had been practising daily with what was, effectively, a new and quite deadly weapon and was confident he could swiftly dispose of anyone armed with a knife, or knife-stick and that he would even be able to fight off a simultaneous attack by two or three assailants.
The quarterstaff classes he had given the previous year had gained him quite a following but he had been disappointed to find that the M’Calls had not continued to develop their skills in his absence. He had seen some of the older Cubs using staves in mock combat but he had not seen a single Bear carrying a quarterstaff on turf patrol and nobody apart from Clearwater had been attracted by the idea of fixing a blade to one end.
For the Plainfolk, the Way of the Warrior was through one-to-one combat with the knife. The deadly accurate crossbow was used for hunting and against sand-burrowers but never against rival Mutes. To shoot down another member of the Plainfolk at long-range would have been absolutely unthinkable. Death itself was unimportant. If Mo-Town thirsted for the spirit of her people, she drank. Courage and honour were the essential qualities. Courage to face the point of an oppponent’s knife in the sure and certain knowledge that one of you must die. Courage to give your life to defend the honour of the clan and the name of the Plainfolk. Steve knew that if he was ever to gain their trust, he had to tread the same deadly path. What was about to happen was a small step along the way.
Crouched in the grass next to Blue-Thunder, Steve watched as a Mute warrior inserted a pointed rod into a hole bored in a small block of wood and set it spinning with his fire-bow. Moments later, the wisps of dry grass laid around the point of the rod began to smoulder. The fire-maker paused every now and then to blow gently until the blackened strands gave birth to tiny points of orange fire. More tinder, more coaxing from the fire-maker, his lips pursed as if he was blowing kisses then finally a tiny flame that he hastened to keep alive.
While this was in progress, Blue-Thunder produced a shank of long-bladed red grass from one of his trail bags and proceeded to bind it to a cross-bow bolt. He then held out the bolt so that the fire-maker could apply the nascent flame. The shank of grass began to burn giving off a dense white smoke. Blue-Thunder laid the bolt into the firing groove of a primed crossbow and aimed at the sky. The bolt soared almost vertically into the air trailing a long thin plume of smoke, seemed to hang there for a moment on reaching its apogee, then plunged downwards in the direction of the red-skins.
Steve took this to be the signal for a general attack but nobody moved. ‘What’s happening?’
‘There are eight red-skins camped by big water. White arrow tells them we want to have peace-talk, not kill. We smoke grass, make trade.’
‘But I thought the idea was to capture them.’
‘Yes. But we always let some go. Red-skins run away from sand-burrowers. If they have nowhere to run to, they not come anymore. Why leave bad place when other places are no better? This is why we make trade. If we take everyone, red-skins will fight us. Everybody die.’ He shrugged philosophically. ‘They don’t want this. Nor do we. A red-skin with no head is bad for trade. The dead-faces want their brains in working order.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ said Steve. ‘Both of you fight Trackers but the renegades – uhh, red-skins – don’t attack Mutes. Because if they did they’d have two enemies instead of one. You’d wipe ’em out. And you don’t kill the red-skins because you need live bodies to trade with the Iron Masters.’
‘You got it.’
‘But you don’t take them all… so by not resisting, some of them stay free. How many? A half, third, quarter…?’
‘It depends,’ replied Blue-Thunder. ‘Most times we make two-way split.’ He smiled. ‘Unless it’s a bad year.’
Steve gazed in the direction in which the smoking bolt had been fired. ‘Supposing they don’t know what the white smoke signal means?’
Blue-Thunder raised his heavy eyebrows. ‘We might have some explaining to do.’
‘I see…’ Although this was all news to him, Steve imagined that AMEXICO must know about ‘white arrows’. It seemed to know about everything else. ‘So – assuming they got the message, they are now busy deciding what to do. I mean who goes and who stays, right?’
‘Right,’ said Blue-Thunder.
‘What happens to those who stay?’
‘They find other wanderers. Red-skin all alone get sick and die. Much safer to be all together. If we find small hand after wheel-boats have gone, we put them on trail of big clan.’
A ‘hand’ in Mute meant six. A ‘small hand’ meant any number less than six – but usually four or five.
Blue-Thunder smiled again. ‘We like to make everybody happy. Good for trade.’
I bet, thought Steve. The logic could not be faulted. The renegades were like buffalo. You kept track of where the herds were and when it was time you went in and cut out the animals you needed. No more, or less. You left the rest on the hoof to fend for themselves until the new hunting trip. Crafty four-eyed bastards. ‘What happens if none of them want to go?’
Blue-Thunder got to his feet. ‘If they fight, we kill.’
The sun edged up over the horizon. Its rays flared around the paramount warrior, filling the side feathers on his helmet with golden fire and throwing the rest of his body into silhouette.
‘Come, Cloud-Warrior. Before the day is out, maybe you will have chewed bone.’
Fifteen
The breakers had camped overnight in a steep-sided, U-shaped depression that opened onto the edge of a large lake. In the middle of the lake were a cluster of small wooded islands. A dried-up water course cut a ragged line through the surrounding terrain into the bottom of the U. Steve followed Blue-Thunder along its northern edge. Half of his pack had crossed over to the other side. The floor of the depression – which was about one hundred yards deep and eighty yards wide – was strewn with rocks and pebbles. At some time in the past, presumably when water had flowed down the draw, it had been part of the lake. At the top left-hand corner of the U, where the shoreline consisted of a precipitous twenty-foot-high cliff, erosion of the soil had loosened several huge boulders which had collapsed into an untidy heap at the water’s edge. A few smaller ones lay half submerged just beyond.
Ranged around the rim of the U were the four other packs that made up Blue
-Thunder’s posse, standing like statues, their weapons glinting in the morning sun. The breakers, who had evidently been caught totally unawares, were backing slowly towards the rocks at the water’s edge. Only half appeared to be armed and these held air rifles clutched to their chests. Two sloping-roofed shelters, made of skins laid on a frame of tied saplings, were ranged on either side of a stone-lined cooking pit about twenty or so yards from the water. The ‘white arrow’, its point embedded with uncanny accuracy near the centre of the depression and in one of the few patches of bare sand, continued to put out a thin, drifting plume of smoke.
‘Come,’ said Blue-Thunder.
Steve joined him as he started down the slope followed by six Bears. Everybody else stayed where they were around the rim of the draw.
Seeing the on-coming deputation, two of the armed breakers halted. Grasping the blade of his knife, Blue-Thunder held it above his head then sheathed it and raised his bare hand. The two breakers began to edge forward. The rest – four men and two women – continued to back off, shuffling sideways towards the cluster of boulders. One of the men ducked out of sight, the others froze awkwardly at the water’s edge.
Steve was too far away to see their expressions but they all gave the impression of being absolutely terrified. And who wouldn’t be, thought Steve, to wake up and find that sixty Mutes had dropped in for breakfast? One of the women looked to be pregnant. Instead of trousers, she wore a wrapround hide skirt similar to the kind some Mute women wore. Until he had been taken prisoner by the M’Calls, Steve had never seen a pregnant woman. In the Federation, guard-mothers stayed at the Life Institute from conception to delivery. The process of fertilisation and the development of the embryo were secrets to which only the First Family had access but through Roz’s medical studies and then through first-hand experience with the Mutes he knew what the swollen belly signified. But what was a mother-to-be doing out here?
Steve placed himself to the right of Blue-Thunder as they stopped a few paces short of the smoking arrow; the six Bears spread out in a line behind them. The two breakers, who were about twenty yards away suddenly changed pace. Dropping their rifles to the trail, they leapt over an irregularly spaced band of small rocks and jogged towards the waiting Mutes with their right hands raised, palm open.
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