Yurth Burden Part 4

He still frowned, but not at her, she guessed. Rather he was seeking some thought he had not tried to capture before.

"I have not, Yurth."

"My name-" Oddly irritated at his form of address, the girl interrupted him, "-is Elossa-we count no Houses in our reckoning."

He looked startled. "I thought-it was always said among us-that the Yurth never spoke their names."

It was her turn to be surprised. What he said was true! She had never known a Yurth to talk so easily to a Raski that names were exchanged. Thought the Raski, by custom, were always ready to give their own and that of the First Ancestor of their House. Yet to her now it seemed needful that he stop calling her "Yurth," perhaps because she knew that among his own land that was a term which was unpleasant.

"They do not," Elossa admitted now, "to those outside the clan."

"But I am not of any clan of yours," he persisted.

"I know." She raised her fingers to press upon her temples. "I am confused. This-this is different."

He nodded. "Yes, Yurth and Raski, by rights we should be in arms against each other. I-I was so earlier. Now I am not." His astonishment was apparent. "In Kal-Nath-Tan there was a horror which entered into me and I did what that made me do. It was not me, and yet a part of me welcomed it. Now I can only wonder at that and see it for a part of the darkness which was, which has always lain there. I ask no forgiveness of you, Elossa." He stumbled a little in p.r.o.nouncing her name. "For a man who is bred to a task must see it through to the best of his ability. I failed in part, but I do stand where none of my kind have before. I have seen yonder-" He pointed to the screen. "-of the beginning of our hatred, and, also, for the first time seen what I cannot yet understand, the lack in us which keeps us what we are-dirt grabbers who do not dream.

"Are dreams illusions, Elossa? Your kind spin them to aid you. But it seems to me that dreams can in a way serve a man better. He must have something beyond dull thoughts centered on himself and the earth under him to become greater. You Yurth conquered the stars. You are not sky-devils as we think. Now I know that. Rather you are people such as ourselves who had a dream of far voyaging and lived to make it come true."

"Where lies that dream within you now, Elossa? Has it been killed because of your feeling of sin and guilt? What do you think beyond yourselves and the ground under you?"

"Little," she answered quietly. "True we seek purpose in all dreams, but we do not use them to change our lives. We are as bound by ancient fears and fates as you. We use our minds to store of knowledge but only within narrow limits. To us the Raski are alien. But why?" She hesitated.

"Why should that be so? In the beginning because you would have been hunted and slain by those maddened by the catastrophe we saw pictured. Later, when your power of mind changed, you-you no longer thought us of any more account than beasts of the woodland. We two speak the truth here and now-is not that the truth?"

"We were lesser beings, children, to move hither and thither at your bidding when we crossed your path or caught your notice in some fas.h.i.+on. Can you not see that by such an opinion of us you fostered and kept alive the shadow born in Kal-Nath-Tan?"

Elossa accepted the logic of what he said. The bitterness of the city's destruction, the coming of a s.p.a.ce-transversing race such as the Yurth destroyed and then replaced with another pattern of thinking. How-how arrogant the Yurth had been-were! They had locked themselves in that arrogance, seeking, they believed, to atone by their own self-exile and austerity. But what they did was sterile, worthless.

Granted that at first they could not live at peace with the Raski, granted that their employment of their machines had altered them irrevocably, yet as time pa.s.sed they might have sought contacts, turned their talents to the service of the Raski instead of jealously using the Upper Sense for unproductive learning. Their pride of martyrdom was their abiding error. She recognized for the first time Yurth life for what it was. and knew sorrow that it had not been otherwise.

"It is so," Elossa said sadly. "We judged you, and you have been right to judge us. Repentance is necessary, but there are other forms of righting a wrong. In choosing our selfish one we have only compounded the original act many times over. Why have we not seen this?" She ended with rising pa.s.sion.

"Why have we not also seen that we lie in the dust because we have allowed the past to bury us so?" he countered. "We did not need Yurth to build anew. Yet no man reached for the first stone to set as a foundation. We have been locked in our pride also, we of the House of Philbur, looking always to the past and seeking only vengeance for what dashed us from our throne. We have been blind and groping."

"We have been blind and not even groping," she matched him. "Yes, we have talents but we use them only in a little. What might grow here if we harnessed them to a freed will and a living cause?" It was as if she were awaking in this instant from a drugged and drugging sleep in which she had lain all her life, awaking to understand the possibilities which could be ahead. But she was only one. Against her the weight of tradition and custom stood strong, perhaps too stout a wall for her to hope to break.

"Where do we go now, and what do we do?" She was at a loss, seeing this new-found enlightenment as perhaps an even more weighty burden to bear.

"That is a question for both of us," he agreed. The tenseness had gone out of his body as he fronted her. "The blind do not always welcome sight thrust upon them. They must wish it or they will be frightened. And fear feeds anger and distrust. Between us lies too great a chasm."

"One which can never be bridged?" There was a lost feeling in her. In part this emotion was like that which had come upon her when she witnessed the Yurth farewell to the stars. Were they to be ever imprisoned in the narrow cleft of their misreading or responsibility?

"Only, I think, when Yurth and Raski can speak one with the other face to face, setting aside the past with a whole heart and mind."

"As we have done here?"

Stans nodded. "As we have done here."

"If I," she said slowly, "return to my clan and tell them what has happened, I am not sure I will be heard with any open minds. There are illusions here. We have both dealt with those, suffered from them. Those who made this Pilgrimage before me must have faced the same or their like. Therefore it can be said that I am suffering from a more subtle and deadly illusion. And," she was being honest not only with him but herself now, "I think that that will be said. At least by those who have made the Pilgrimage and know the nature of this place."

"If I," he echoed her, "now return to my people and preach cooperation with the Yurth I shall die." His words were blunt but that they were in truth she did not doubt.

"But if I return and do not share what I have learned," Elossa continued, "then I am betraying that part of me which is the deepest and best, for I shall testify to a lie which I might have threatened with the truth. We cannot lie, not and remain Yurth. That is another part of the burden laid upon us by the Upper Sense."

"And if I return and am killed for speaking the truth-" He smiled a faint shadow of a smile. "-then what profit do my people gain? So it would seem we must be liars in spite of ourselves, Lady Elossa. And if it be true that you indeed cannot lie, then you face even worse."

"There are mountains here," Elossa said musingly, "and I can live alone. Yurth blood has this-we are not bred to soft lying or over much food. Who can tell what may lie in the future? Another may come here on the Pilgrimage and see as clearly. A handful of such, from small seed do high-reaching trees eventually grow."

"You need not be alone. Our own enlightenment is not yet old. Maybe some thinking together upon ways and means can show the two of us how we can do better than stay in perpetual exile. I know that the Yurth choose to dwell apart. Do you still hold to that, also, my lady?"

He was using the address of a high-born Raski to one of equal breeding. She looked at him in wonder as he raised his hand and held it out to her. What he suggested countered every teaching of her life to this minute. But was it not that teaching which had laid hampering bonds upon all her and her blood? Was it not that which must be broken?

"I do not hold to that which would imprison the mind in a false way of thought," she replied. She put out her hand slowly, fighting the distaste for flesh meeting alien flesh. There was so much she would have to fight, and to learn, in the future. The time to begin was now.

There was a bite in the wind which wailed and moaned around the last vestiges of Kal-Hath- Tan, raised grit of sterile earth to add to the mounding which already half hid the death s.h.i.+p from the sky. Elossa, in spite of her life among stark heights, knowing well the breath of winter there, s.h.i.+vered as she stood at the foot of the walkway which led up into the ancient Yurth s.h.i.+p.

It was not only the chill of that wind which troubled her, there was an inner chill also. She, who had come here to seek out the Secret of Yurth after the custom of her people, had made a hard choice indeed. Learning the manner of the burden which death had laid upon her land, she had deliberately thereafter chosen not to follow the years-old pattern and return to her clan but rather to try to think in a new way, to hunt a middle road in which Yurth might some day be at peace with Raski and the past be as buried as Kal-Hath-Tan and the s.h.i.+p.

"There is harsh weather to come." Her companion's nostrils quivered as if, like any of the feral dwellers in the heights, he could scent some change in wind which was a warning. "We shall need shelter."

It was difficult for Elossa to believe, even now, that she and a Raski could speak together as if they were of one blood and clan. Most carefully she kept tight rein upon her thought- send, knowing that unless she was ever aware of that, she might unconsciously communicate, or try to, without words. While to the Raski such communication was a dire, abhorred invasion.

She must learn carefully, if not slowly, since they had made this uncertain alliance. Stans claimed to be of a House which had ruled in Kal-Hath-Tan, bred and trained himself for the task of revenge upon the Yurth. But he was also the first of his blood to enter the half- buried s.h.i.+p, and therein learn the truth of what had happened in the very long ago. Learning so, he had deliberately set aside his long-fostered hatred, being intelligent enough to understand that, grievous as the destruction of the city had been through an error of the Yurth s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+p, yet upon his people also lay some of the fault. For what had happened since? They had allowed themselves to sink back from the civilization they had once known, choosing to be less than they might be.

Yurth and Raski-Elossa's whole person shrank from any close contact with him, even as he must find in her much which to him was unnatural and perhaps even repulsive.

He did not look at her now, rather he stood gazing out across the mounded ruins of the city toward that distant rise of hills and heights on the other side of the cup-like valley in which Kal-Hath-Tan stood. As tall as she, his darker skin and close-cropped black hair was strange to her eyes. He wore the leather and thick wool of a hunter, and the weapons he carried were those of a roving plainsman.

Accustomed to the standards of the Yurth, Elossa could not truthfully judge, she decided fleetingly, whether he might even be termed fair appearing or not. But his determination, his strength of spirit and resolve, that she accepted as fact.

"There is still time," she said slowly.

As if he, too, had the Yurth power of mind-speech, Stans answered her before she had put her thought entirely into words.

"To forget what we heard and saw, Lady? To go back to those who are willfully blind and who squat in the mud like children who are self-willed and resist all which they should learn? No." He shook his head. "There is no longer any such time for me. Yonder-" With one hand he sketched a gesture to the distant hills. "We can find shelter. And it is best that we strive to do so. Winter comes early in these heights and bad storms strike sometimes with little warning."

Stans did not suggest that they take refuge in the s.h.i.+p, or in that chamber in the mound where he had imprisoned her on her first coming into the ruins. In that choice he was right, Elossa knew. They must both be free of the ancient taint which stained all which lay here. Only away from the evidences of the past could they really confront the future.

Thus together they struck out from ruins and s.h.i.+p, while the star s.h.i.+p's entrance closed behind them, sealing the secret once more to be ready at the coming of another Yurth seeker. Perhaps a seeker who might also be persuaded to realize the truth that what lay in the years behind must not be held about one as a cloak to deaden in turn the future.

Clouds gathered overhead and the wind grew stronger, pressing at their backs, as they crossed the valley, as if it moved to expel them from both ruins and s.h.i.+p. Stans went warily, continually eyeing the terrain ahead as if expecting some attack. Elossa allowed her mind-search to range a little. There was no life here. But she felt it was best not to bring to the attention of her companion the results of a gift so dreaded and hated by all his kind. This, save for them, was a barren land, left to the long dead.

The pace Stans set was one she could match with ease, since the Yurth had long since been a roaming people. He did not speak again, nor had she any reason to break the brittle silence lying between them. Their companions.h.i.+p was too new, too untested. And she had no desire to do that testing.

Twilight was upon them well before they had even reached the foothills-though those were clear-cut now, looking as stark and barren as the plain over which they journeyed. Stans halted at last, pointing to the left where some stones stood tall as if growing tree-like from the ground.

"Those can be a windbreak, unless that changes direction." He spoke for the first time since they had left the ruins. "It is the best shelter we can find hereabouts."

Elossa eyed those stones more doubtfully. She had good reason to believe that they were no natural feature of the earth and plain, rather more ruins. The illusions which might cling to such a place were ever in her mind. Even though such manifestations were only hallucinations to be controlled by Yurth training, still the very vividness with which they could paint themselves on the air could not but stir fear, and fear works upon the stability of the most disciplined mind.

Only Stans was very right, they could not keep on going through the night which was coming so fast. Even a faint promise of shelter away from the wind was to be sought. These are stones only, she told herself. If they hold aught of emotion, an imprint on them strong enough to summon illusions to torment the sensitive, she must armor herself with the truth and dismiss such visions for what they were.

As the Raski had pointed out, they did afford a windbreak. So when the two travelers hunkered down among the rocks they were, for the first time, out of the push of that cold. Elossa opened her journey bag.

Food, drink, both were problems they must face now. The supplies she had carried were scanty and not meant to serve more than one for a few days. She broke one of the coa.r.s.e meal cakes carefully apart and offered half to Stans. There was water in her bottle, though they must limit themselves to sips until they discovered some river or spring in those heights ahead.

He did not refuse her bounty and he ate slowly as one mindful that every crumb must be found and munched. Of the water he took very little. When he had done he nodded to the hills ahead.

"The Naxes rises there. Water and game. . . . Also. . . ." Stans paused, frowning, as if his own thoughts had become a puzzle. He rubbed his hand across his forehead and continued, but it was as if he spoke more to himself than to the girl beside him. "There is the cave- the Mouth of Atturn."

"The Mouth of Atturn," she repeated when he again fell silent. "You have knowledge of this place?" The tradition of his House had made him in this generation the guardian of Kal- Hath-Tan. Did he also know more of what lay about the city?

His frown was more intense. "I know," he said with such sharpness as to warn her off any further questioning.

So wrapped in their cloaks they slept behind the stones until Elossa was jerked suddenly out of slumber by some inner warning triggered by the Yurth talent. Over her crouched the Raski hardly visible in the night's darkness. Some trick of the small starlight from overhead touched upon what he held-a bared knife.

Elossa rolled to one side as the knife struck down into the earth where she had lain. But the blow intended to bury steel in her flesh, now slicing into the ground instead, threw Stans off balance. She rolled again, setting between them one of the stones. Getting to her feet now, her staff in hand, the girl waited, her heart beating with force enough to shake her body.

Ruthlessly she reached out with mind-touch. The wildness of thought she so found was near as upsetting as that attack had been. This was like tapping a mind gone insane. Horror and fear held the Raski in tight grip. And she had a glimpse of a distorted monster. He-he thought that was she!

"Stans!" She cried aloud his name, striving to so awaken him. For it seemed to Elossa that only a man in the hold of a compelling nightmare could be so disoriented.

She heard an answering cry, wild and beast-like. Then she saw him beyond the stones. He was running, on into the darkness of the night. And he went like a man pursued by an unbelievable source of terror.

Shaking, Elossa put out one hand to the stone behind which she had taken refuge. What had happened? All she could guess in answer was that uneasy fear which had been hers earlier- that these stones might generate illusion and one such had worked upon the Raski strongly because of his very heritage.

There was no use in running after him. If the stones were the source of his terror, then once he was out of range, his sanity should again be in control. She opened her mind wide, sent out a questing which lasted only an instant or two since she had no desire to attract any influences which might abide here.

Stans-he was still in flight. She had no desire to try to compel his return. Such an attempt might only heighten his distortion of mind at present.

Once more Elossa settled down in the lee of the stones. To all her cautious probing these remained only rock. It would seem that if they did exude some illusions such were a menace to Raski only.

Though she was uneasy and wanted to stay on guard, she drifted once more into sleep. Then, for a second time, she awoke into dire danger. For she opened her eyes, instantly awake, only to believe for a second or two that she was still caught in some particularly vivid dream.

This was not the plain where she had fallen asleep by the rocks. Instead she stood leaning on her staff in a narrow valley between two rises of hills. There was a season-killed and dry looking brush about. But in the middle of that, directly before her, crouched a sargon, its snarling echoed from the hill walls as a heavy menace.

The beast was a young one, perhaps of this season's litter. But even so immature a sargon was more than a match for any human. While the creature seemed somehow to guess that she must be helpless prey.

Frantically Elossa summoned the authority of mind control. But it was as if her trained thought was over-slow. She could not hold this raving beast nor turn it! She was going to be torn by those claws. She was. . . .

Out of the air came a shrill singing sound. The sargon's flanks quivered as it gathered strength to launch itself upon her. But now it yowled and in its throat showed the shaft end of a crossbow bolt.

Elossa came to life. She unleashed at the creature the full power of her talent. While, at the same time, she flung herself to one side even as she had moved to escape Stans' attack.

The sargon squalled, clawed with one paw at the wound in its throat from which poured a flood of dark blood. Elossa flattened her body tight against the wall of the hill. Between her and the wounded beast there was only a thin growth of brush which the creature could easily break through. But with her thought she prodded as best she could.

As if it had not seen her part-escape moments earlier, the sargon charged forward, breaking down brush. Blood spouted, as its exertions speeded the flow. Again that wailing in the air and a second bolt drove into the body of frantic beast, placed behind one of its forelegs.

Sprinkling blood widely, the sargon whirled around. Once more it did see her. It was readying for another spring. She could not control this raging alien mind. No one could make a sargon do other than its own will-or. . . .

Perhaps it was the feeling that death was very close to her which speeded Elossa's own thought processes. She dropped her vain attempt to somehow divert the attention of the beast. Instead, with a burst of energy which she rose to only under the lash of fear, she created an illusion. A second Elossa (not too carefully depicted, but at least in the animal's sight enough like its intended prey to draw its attention) now stood before the sargon. The illusion turned and ran. The sargon squalling aloud in its pain and blood l.u.s.t swung its heavy body around once more to pursue.

It must have so presented the unseen bowman with a better target. For with a third shrilling of flight a bolt found its target. The sargon flung up its head, opened its jaw for a great roar. But it was not sound alone which burst from the beast. Rather a second outpouring of blood fountained down to earth. The creature took one step and a second, and then toppled. Though it still fought to regain its feet and its cries sounded strongly, the end had come.

Elossa needed the support of the bank against which she had taken refuge. That last outpouring of her talent had weakened her as she had seldom been since the earliest days of her training. It would take much rest until she could once more summon even the lightest of mind-power to her service.

She lifted her head as pebbles and earth cascaded down the hillside across the narrow valley. Stans half slid down in their wake. She could not test his mood by her only defense, not in her present condition. Though if he meant her harm now he need only have allowed the sargon to have its way. Or was it that some touch of the ancient revenge bred in him still worked to the point that he must take Yurth life by his own hand?

She stood quietly. In fact she could not have fled, even if she so wished, all the energy having seeped out of her. He paused, watching her across the body of the sargon. Then, without word he knelt to work his bolts out of the still quivering carca.s.s, deliberately cleansing each in a fas.h.i.+on by driving it point down into the earth and plucking it forth again.

He no longer looked at Elossa. It was as if she were invisible. Nor did he speak. What would happen now? Her distrust of the Raski had awakened once again. Perhaps there was too great a gulf between their two races for any amount of good will to bridge.

Restoring his bolts to their quiver Stans got to his feet again. Now he did face her. There was a shade of expression on his dark face but she could not read it.

"Life for life." He spoke those three words as if they had been forced out of him against his will. What did he mean? That this was in payment of the succor she had given him when he had been clawed by a similar beast on the journey to Kal-Hath-Tan? Or had he saved her now because his attempt in the night had failed and he would be quit of the memory of that? She felt blind when she could not mind-probe for the truth.

"Why," she said at last, "why would you take knife to me? Is your hate from the old days still so strong, Stans of the House of Philbur?"

He opened his mouth as if about to answer and then closed it firmly once more. There was about him an aura of wariness as if he were fronting a possible enemy.

"Why must you take my life, Stans?" she asked again.

He shook his head slowly. "I do not kill," he began and then his head came up proudly and he met her in a fast locking of eyes.

"It was not I. This is a haunted land. It had secrets of things we Raski have long forgotten, which perhaps even you Yurth, with all your dark powers, never knew. There was another will taking over my body. When it did not win what it wished, it left me. I-" Again he frowned. "I think it is different-not Raski as I know, not Yurth. . . . It is very dangerous-perhaps to the both of us."

That this world might have secrets was, indeed, not impossible. Elossa turned her head to look up at the hills about them. They could go back, put into some corner of their minds to be walled there, all that had happened, all they had learned concerning themselves and their people. But she did not believe that was possible. To go on was to venture into the totally unknown. Yet she had a certainty growing within her that this was what could be the only road for her.

"We must go on," Stans said. "There is that-it is like Kal-Hath-Tan-it draws. Or does not that drawing touch you, Lady? I know that you may have no trust in me now, yet in some manner we are bound together."

Elossa tried to summon the talent-to judge-perhaps to feel what he said lay upon him. But she was too exhausted. If she went it would be going blind for a s.p.a.ce until her energy was renewed. Resolutely she pushed away from her support.

"I have found water, also the path to the Mouth," he said then. "It is not far."

"Then let us go." So she chose a new road for the second time.

So this was the Mouth. Elossa hitched the carry cord of her supply bag up higher on her shoulder, studying the opening before her. Undoubtedly the place had been, or was, some cave opening, natural in these heights to begin with. But there had been the work of man overlaying that of nature. A portion of rock surrounding the opening had been smoothed to provide a surface into which were deep carven, strange mask-like faces.

Or were those separate faces? Rather, it seemed to the girl that they were the same face expressing different emotions, mainly, she decided, malignant ones. Now she asked of her companion, breaking the dividing silence which had lain between them since they had begun the climb to this place: "You name this 'Mouth of Atturn,' who then-or what then-is Atturn?"

Stans did not glance toward her at all. Instead he faced the dark opening of the Mouth, into which daylight seemed reluctant to reach, with a faint shadow of fascination on his face. The Raski did not answer at once, as if her words reached him so faintly he scarce heard them at all.

"Atturn?" Now his head did turn slowly, reluctantly. "Atturn-Lady, I do not know. But this was a place of power for the ruling House of Kal-Hath-Tan." He rubbed one hand across his forehead.

"One of your legends? But there must be more," Elossa prodded. Before she entered such a place she wanted to learn all she could. Her experience with Stans in that other underground place beneath the ruins was not such as to encourage her to try a new venture into unknown darkness.