Андрэ Нортон - Beast Master's Planet

Together they walked slowly along that wharf—the bare rings, the greasy, ill-smelling flood that washed sluggishly along its side—The Cavern of the Hundred Gardens had been alien—alien but not inimical. Here there was a difference. Again Hosteen could not reconcile the minds that had created the gardens and those that had engineered these borings in the mountain of the Blue.

“What kind of ships?” Logan asked suddenly. “Who were they and why did they want ships here? The Gardens—and this place—don’t match.”

“They are not the same,” Hosteen agreed. “Kwii halchinigii ’ant’iihnii—”

“What?”

“I said—this place smells of witchcraft.”

“That is the truth!” Logan commented with feeling. “Where do we go now? Somehow I don’t fancy swimmin’.”

They had reached the end of the wharf and were gazing out over the sluggishly flowing water, trying to catch some landmark in the beam of the torch. But save for those vague shadows far to the right, there was nothing to suggest this place had any boundaries beyond.

It was when Hosteen swung the torch left to pick out a continuation of the wall through which they had come that they sighted a possible exit. A beach of sorts extended along this side of the cavern—several yards of coarse sand and gravel between the foot of the wall and the lapping of the dark water. And along the wall itself were dark shadows, which might or might not contain the openings to further caves or passages. It was more inviting to investigate than the water, for Hosteen agreed with Logan’s comment moments earlier—this was not a place to tempt a swimmer. The very look of that opaque flood suggested unpleasant things lurking below its encrusted surface.

They retreated along the wharf, leaped from it to the fringe of beach. Here and there stones of some size were embedded in the gravel—or were they stones? Hosteen stopped and toed one of them over with his boot. The black eye holes of a skull stared back at him. Curving horns rooted in the bone told him that a Norbie had died here. Some time ago he judged by the condition of the bone.

“In the Name of the Seven Thunders, what’s that?” Logan caught at Hosteen’s arm, dragged the torch forward. And again its gleam picked out details of bleached bone.

But such bone! Hosteen found it hard to picture that great head ever enclosed in flesh. Half buried in the gravel as the skull now was, the angle of that fanged jaw as long as his arm, the huge pits of eye sockets, were like nothing he had ever seen on Arzor or on fifty other planets either.

“Three eyes!” Logan’s voice sounded weirdly over the lisping lap of the water. “It had three eyes!”

He was right. Two eye sockets abnormally far to each side were centered by a third midpoint above the jagged toothed jaw. Three eyes!

On Terra there had been monsters in the far past whose bones had endured out of their own era into the time of humankind, so that man had dug them free of earth and rock and set them up in museums to marvel at. Perhaps this was one of the ancient things that had once dominated Arzor, its kind long since vanished from the planet. Yet Hosteen did not think so. Those three eye sockets were a distortion, alien.

“It must have been a monster!” Logan was down on his knees scraping at the gravel gingerly, as if he did not want to touch the bone with his bare hands. And now Hosteen surveyed the exposed skull narrowly. He went back, picked up the Norbie one by a horn, and brought it to rest beside that three-eyed thing, comparing one to the other.

“What’s the matter?” Logan wanted to know.

“Shil hazheen—”

Logan looked at him in some exasperation. “Talk so a fella can understand, won’t you?”

“I am confused,” Hosteen obligingly translated. “This is impossible.”

“What is?”

“This skull”—Hosteen pointed to the Norbie—“is crumbling away from age, perhaps from damp. Yet it is of a native, a type of Arzoran life that exists today. Compare it with this other one. The three-eye is no different; they could be of the same age—”

“What are you tryin’ to say?”

Hosteen spoke of the early giant reptiles on Terra, of the chance that this might have been a relic of pre-intelligent life on Arzor.

“Only it doesn’t look old enough—that’s what you mean? Well, couldn’t the Norbie have been old, too?”

“That might be so—to each planet its own history. Only on Terra such monsters had vanished long before the first primitive man had evolved. And surely Norbie legends would mention these if they had shared the same world at the same time.”

“The plains people have always been afraid of the Blue.”

“But not for any reason such as monsters, for they do talk of those giant killer birds and every other known natural menace.”

“Which means—?”

“That if these things were alive only a short time ago, historically speaking, say a century or so in the past, they might have been confined to underground places such as this, known only to victims trapped here.”

“And that some three-eye could be waitin’ right around the next bend now?” Logan got to his feet and brushed sand from his hands. “That isn’t the most cheerful news in the world?”

“I could be wrong.” But Hosteen was not going to relax any vigilance on that count. And how much advantage would an antiperso grenade give him over sudden death watching through three eyes?

They went on down the beach at a slower pace, using the torch on every dark spot before them, alert to any sound. Yet the lap of the water, the crunch of their boots on the coarse gravel was all they heard.

So far none of those shadows had concealed any further openings. But they were well away from the wharf when Logan again caught at Hosteen’s touch hand, directing the beam higher on the wall.

“Somethin’ moved—up there!”

Out into the path of the light flew a winged creature uttering a small, mewling cry. The light brought into vivid life yellow wings banded with white.

“Feefraw!” Logan named one of the common berry-feeding birds to be found along any mountainside. “But what is it doing in here?”

“It could be showing us a way out.” Hosteen aimed his light straight for the spot from which the bird had come. There was an opening deeper than any of the shallow crevices they had discovered so far. The feefraw must have gotten into the mountain somewhere, perhaps down this very passage.

The bird circled around in the path of the beam, and now, as if guided by the light, went back to the hole above, where it settled down on the edge, still mewling mournfully.

“Back door?” Logan suggested.

“No harm in trying it.”

An advantage of that hole was that it certainly did not look large enough to accommodate the bulk of any creature with a skull as big as the one they had found. One could travel that road without fearing a monster lurking behind every rock ahead. Hosteen tucked the torch into the front of his shirt and began to climb toward that promising niche.

They stood together in the opening of another cave. Could they hope by the evidence of the bird that it was the mouth of a passage, a passage giving upon light, air, and the clean outer world?

If this was a passage, it was not a smoothed, coated one, made ready for use by the Unknowns. Here there was no black coating on the walls, only the rough purple-red of the native stone. But there was a way before them, and as they started, the feefraw cried and fluttered along behind as if drawn by the torch light.

Unhappily the way did not slope upward but ran straight, in some places so narrow that they had to turn sidewise and scrape through between jutting points of rock. But the air was a moving current, and it lacked the strange quality of that in the alien ways.