The Maker of Universes

VIII

During Wolff’s second watch, something black and long and swift slipped through the moonlight between two bushes. Wolff sent an arrow into the predator, which gave a whistling scream and reared up on its hind legs, towering twice as high as a horse. Wolff fitted another arrow to the string and fired it into the white belly. Still the animal did not die, but went whistling and crashing away through the brush.

By then Kickaha, knife in hand, was beside him. “You were lucky,” he said. “You don’t always see them, and then, pffft! They go for the throat.”

“I could have used an elephant gun,” Wolff said, “and I’m not sure that would have stopped it. By the way, why don’t the gworl—or the Indians, from what you’ve told me—use firearms?”

“It’s strictly forbidden by the Lord. You see, the Lord doesn’t like some things. He wants to keep his people at a certain population level, at a certain technological level, and within certain social structures. The Lord runs a tight planet.

“For instance, he likes cleanliness. You may have noticed that the folk of Okeanos are a lazy, happy-go-lucky lot. Yet they always clean up their messes. No litter anywhere. The same goes on this level, on every level. The Amerindians are also personally clean, and so are the Drachelanders and Atlanteans. The Lord wants it that way, and the penalty for disobedience is death.”

“How does he enforce his rules?” Wolff asked.

“Mostly by having implanted them in the mores of the inhabitants. Originally, he had a close contact with the priests and medicine men, and by using religion—with himself as the deity—he formed and hardened the ways of the populace. He liked neatness, disliked firearms or any form of advanced technology. Maybe he was a romantic; I don’t know. But the various societies on this world are mainly conformist and static.”

“So what? Is progress necessarily desirable or a static society undesirable? Personally, though I detest the Lord’s arrogance, his cruelty and lack of humanity, I approve of some of the things he’s done. With some exceptions, I like this world, far prefer it to Earth.”

“You’re a romantic, too!”

“Maybe. This world is real and grim enough, as you already know. But it’s free of grit and grime, of diseases of any kind, of flies and mosquitoes and lice. Youth lasts as long as you live. All in all, it’s not such a bad place to live in. Not for me, anyway.”

Wolff was on the last watch when the sun rounded the corner of the world. The starflies paled, and the sky was green wine. The air passed cool fingers over the two men and washed their lungs with invigorating currents. They stretched and then went down from the platform to hunt for breakfast. Later, full of roast rabbit and juicy berries, they renewed their journey.

The evening of the third day after, while the sun was a hand’s breadth from slipping around the monolith, they were out on the plain. Ahead of them was a tall hill beyond which, so Kickaha said, was a small woods. One of the high trees there would give them refuge for the night.

Suddenly a party of about forty men rode around the hill. They were dark-skinned and wore their hair in two long braids. Their faces were painted with white and red streaks and black X’s. Their lower arms bore small round shields, and they held lances or bows in their hands. Some wore bear-heads as helmets; others had feathers stuck into caps or wore bonnets with sweeping bird feathers.

Seeing the two men on foot before them, the riders yelled and urged their horses into a gallop. Lances tipped with steel points were leveled. Bows were fitted, with arrows, and heavy steel axes or bladestudded clubs were lifted.

“Stand firm!” Kickaha said. He was grinning. “They are the Hrowakas, the Bear People. My people.”

He stepped forward and lifted his bow above him with both hands. He shouted at the charging men in their own tongue, a speech with many glottalized stops, nasalized vowels, and a swift-rising but slowdescending intonation.

Recognizing him, they shouted, “AngKungawas TreKickaha!” They galloped by, their spears stabbing as closely as possible without touching him, the clubs and axes whistling across his face or above his head, and arrows plunging near his feet or even between them.

Wolff was given the same treatment, which he bore without flinching. Like Kickaha, he showed a smile, but he did not think that it was relaxed.

The Hrowakas wheeled their horses and charged back. This time they pulled their beasts up short, rearing, kicking, and whinnying. Kickaha leaped up and dragged a feather-bonneted youth from his animal. Laughing and panting, the two wrestled on the ground until Kickaha had pinned the Hrowakas. Then Kickaha arose and introduced the loser to Wolff.

“NgashuTangis, one of my brothers-in-law.”

Two Amerinds dismounted and greeted Kickaha with much embracing and excited speech. Kickaha waited until they were calmed down and then began to speak long and earnestly. He frequently jabbed his finger toward Wolff. After a fifteen-minute discourse, interrupted now and then by a brief question, he turned smiling to Wolff.

“We’re in luck. They’re on their way to raid the Tsenakwa, who live fairly close to the Trees of Many Shadows. I explained what we were doing here, though not all of it by any means. They don’t know we’re bucking the Lord himself, and I’m not about to tell them. But they do know we’re on the trail of Chryseis and the gworl and that you’re a friend of mine. They also know that Podarge is helping us. They’ve got a great respect for her and her eagles and would like to do her a favor if they could.

“They’ve got plenty of spare horses, so take your choice. Only thing I hate about this is that you won’t get to visit the lodges of the Bear People and I’ll miss seeing my two wives, Giushowei and Angwanat. But you can’t have everything.”

The war party rode hard that day and the next, changing horses every half-hour. Wolff became saddle-sore—blanket-sore, rather. By the third morning he was in as good a shape as any of the Bear People and could stay on a horse all day without feeling that he had lockjaw in every muscle of his body and even in some of the bones.

The fourth day, the party was held up for eight hours. A herd of the giant bearded bison marched across their path; the beasts formed a column two miles across and ten miles long, a barrier that no one, man or animal, could cross. Wolff chafed, but the others were not too unhappy, because riders and horses alike needed a rest. Then, at the end of the column, a hundred Shanikotsa hunters rode by, intent on driving their lances and arrows into the bison on the fringes. The Hrowakas wanted to swoop down upon them and slay the entire group and only an impassioned speech by Kickaha kept them back. Afterwards, Kickaha told Wolff that the Bear People thought one of them was equal to ten of any other tribe.

“They’re great fighters, but a little bit overconfident and arrogant. If you know how many times I’ve had to talk them out of getting into situations where they would have been wiped out!”

They rode on, but were halted at the end of an hour by NgashuTangis, one of the scouts for that day. He charged in yelling and gesturing. Kickaha questioned him, then said to Wolff, “One of Podarge’s pets is a couple of miles from here. She landed in a tree and requested NgashuTangis to bring me to her. She can’t make it herself; she’s been ripped up by a flock of ravens and is in a bad way. Hurry!”

The eagle was sitting on the lowest branch of a lone tree, her talons clutched about the narrow limb, which bent under her weight. Dried red-black blood covered her green feathers, and one eye had been torn out. With the other, she glared at the Bear People, who kept a respectful distance. She spoke in Mycenaean to Kickaha and Wolff.

“I am Aglaia. I know you of old, Kickaha—Kickaha the trickster. And I saw you, O Wolff, when you were a guest of great-winged Podarge, my sister and queen. She it was who sent many of us out to search for the dryad Chryseis and the gworl and the horn of the Lord. But I, I alone, saw them enter the Trees of Many Shadows on the other side of the plain.

“I swooped down on them, hoping to surprise them and seize the horn. But they saw me and formed a wall of knives against which I could only impale myself. So I flew back up, so high they could not see me. But I, far-sighted treader of the skies, could see them.”

“They’re arrogant even while dying,” Kickaha said softly in English to Wolff. “Rightly so.”

The eagle drank water offered by Kickaha, and continued. “When night fell, they camped at the edge of a copse of trees. I landed on the tree below which the dryad slept under a deerskin robe. It had dried blood on it, I suppose from the man who had been killed by the gworl. They were butchering him, getting ready to cook him over their fires.

“I came down to the ground on the opposite side of the tree. I had hoped to talk to the dryad, perhaps even enable her to escape. But a gworl sitting near her heard the flutter of my wings. He looked around the tree, and that was his mistake, for my claws took him in his eyes. He dropped his knife and tried to tear me loose from his face. And so he did, but much of his face and both eyes came along with my talons. I told the dryad to run then, but she stood up and the robe fell off. I could see then that her hands and her legs were bound.

“I went into the brush, leaving the gworl to wail for his eyes. For his death, too, because his fellows would not be burdened with a blind warrior. I escaped through the woods and back to the plains. There I was able to fly off again. I flew toward the nest of the Bear People to tell you, O Kickaha and O Wolff, beloved of the dryad. I flew all night and on into the day.

“But a hunting pack of the Eyes of the Lord saw me first. They were above and ahead of me, in the glare of the sun. They plummeted down, those playhawks, and took me by surprise. I fell, driven by their impact and by the weight of a dozen with their talons clamped upon me. I fell, turning over and over and bleeding under the thrusts of flint-sharp beaks.

“Then, I, Aglaia, sister of Podarge, righted myself and also gathered my senses. I seized the shrieking ravens and bit their heads off or tore their wings or legs off. I killed the dozen on me, only to be attacked by the rest of the pack. These I fought, and the story was the same. They died, but in their dying they caused my death. Only because they were so many.”

There was a silence. She glared at them with her remaining eye, but the life was swiftly unraveling from it to reveal the blank spool of death. The Bear People had fallen quiet; even the horses ceased snorting. The wind whispering in from the skies was the loudest noise.

Abruptly, Aglaia spoke in a weak but still arrogantly harsh voice.

“Tell Podarge she need not be ashamed of me. And promise me, O Kickaha—no trickster words to me—promise me that Podarge will be told.”

“I promise, O Aglaia,” Kickaha said. “Your sisters will come here and carry your body far out from the rims of the tiers, out in the green skies, and you will be launched to float through the abyss, free in death as in life, until you fall into the sun or find your resting place upon the moon.”

“I hold you to it, manling,” she said.

Her head drooped, and she fell forward. But the iron talons were locked in on the branch so that she swung back and forth, upside down. The wings sagged and spread out, the tips brushing the ends of the grass.

Kickaha exploded into orders. Two men were dispatched to look for eagles to be informed of Aglaia’s report and of her death. He said nothing, of course, about the horn, and he had to spend some time in teaching the two a short speech in Mycenaean. After being satisfied that they had memorized it satisfactorily, he sent them on their way. Then the party was delayed further in getting Aglaia’s body to a higher position in the tree, where she would be beyond the reach of any carnivore except the puma and the carrion birds.

It was necessary to chop off the limb to which she clung and to hoist the heavy body up to another limb. Here she was tied with rawhide to the trunk and in an upright position.

“There!” Kickaha said when the work was done.

“No creature will come near her as long as she seems to be alive. All fear the eagles of Podarge.”

The afternoon of the sixth day after Aglaia the party made a long stop at a waterhole. The horses were given a chance to rest and to fill their bellies with the long green grass. Kickaha and Wolff squatted side by side on top of a small hill and chewed on an antelope steak. Wolff was gazing interestedly at a small herd of mastodons only four hundred yards away. Near them, crouched in the grass, was a striped male lion, a 900-pound specimen of Felix Atrox. The lion had some slight hopes of getting a chance at one of the calves.

Kickaha said, “The gworl were damn lucky to make the forest in one piece, especially since they’re on foot. Between here and the Trees of Many Shadows are the Tsenakwa and other tribes. And the KhingGatawriT.”

“The Half-Horses?” Wolff said. In the few days with the Hrowakas, he had picked up an amazing amount of vocabulary items and was even beginning to grasp some of the complicated syntax.

“The Half-Horses. Hoi Kentauroi. Centaurs. The Lord made them, just as he’s made the other monsters of this world. There are many tribes of them on the Amerindian plains. Some are Scythian or Sarmatian speakers, since the Lord snatched part of his centaur material from those ancient steppedwellers. But others have adopted the tongues of their human neighbors. All have adopted the Plains tribal culture—with some variations.”

The war party came to the Great Trade Path. This was distinguishable from the rest of the plain only by posts driven into the ground at mile-intervals and topped by carved ebony images of the Tishquetmoac god of commerce, Ishquettlammu. Kickaha urged the party into a gallop as they came near it and it did not slow until the Path was far behind.

“If the Great Trade Path ran to the forest, instead of parallel with it,” he told Wolff, “we’d have it made. As long as we stayed on it, we’d be undisturbed. The Path is sacrosanct; even the wild HalfHorses respect it. All the tribes get their steel weapons, cloth blankets, jewelry, chocolate, fine tobacco, and so on from the Tishquetmoac, the only civilized people on this tier. I hurried us across the Path because I wouldn’t be able to stop the Hrowakas from tarrying for a few days’ trade if we came across a merchant caravan. You’ll notice our braves have more furs than they need on their horses. That’s just in case. But we’re okay now.”

Six days went by with no sign of enemy tribes except the black-and-red striped tepees of the Irennussoik at a distance. No warriors rode out to challenge them, but Kickaha did not relax until many miles had fallen behind them. The next day the plain began to change: the knee-high and bright green grass was interspersed with a bluish grass only several inches high. Soon the party was riding over a rolling land of blue.

“The stamping ground of the Half-Horse,” Kickaha said. He sent the scouts to a greater distance from the main party.

“Don’t let yourself be taken alive,” he reminded Wolff.

“Especially by the Half-Horse. A human plains tribe might decide to adopt you instead of killing you if you had guts enough to sing merrily and spit in their faces while they roasted you over a low fire. But the Half-Horses don’t even have human slaves. They’d keep you alive and screaming for weeks.”

On the fourth day after Kickaha’s warning, they topped a rise and saw a black band ahead.

“Trees growing along the Winnkaknaw River,” Kickaha said. “We’re almost halfway to the Trees of Many Shadows. Let’s push the horses until we get to the river. I’ve got a hunch we’ve eaten up most of our luck.”

He fell silent as he and the others saw a flash of sun on white several miles to their right. Then the white horse of Wicked Knife, a scout, disappeared into a shallow between rises. A few seconds later, a dark mass appeared on the rise behind him.

“The Half-Horse!” Kickaha yelled. “Let’s go! Make for the river! We can make a stand in the trees along it, if we can get there!”