Андрэ Нортон - Beast Master's Planet

“In the mountains,” Gorgol signed, an explanation that did not explain at all. “We ran far before the fires.”

“We?”

Gorgol turned his head and pursed his lips for another whistle. For a moment Hosteen hoped Logan had found his way here too. But the man coming out of a screen of lacy fronds was a stranger.

Rags of green uniform still slung to a lath-thin body, a body displaying dark bruises such as Gorgol bore. Only it was a human body, and there were no horns, only a mop of brown hair on the head.

“So—Zolti was right,” the stranger said in a voice that shook a little. “There was help here all along—we could have made it out—home.”

Then he was on the ground as if his long legs had folded bone-lessly under him, his face buried in his scratched and earth-streaked hands, his sharp shoulder blades shaking with harsh, tearing sobs he could not control.

Who is this one?” Hosteen asked Gorgol.

“I do not know, for he has not the finger talk,” the native signed in return. “We came together on the mountain, and he led me on a path through the flames. I think that he is one who has run in fear for long and long, and yet still will fight—truly a warrior.”

Hosteen signaled with a twitch of shoulder, and Baku took off for a perch on a nearby rock. The Terran sat down beside the stranger and laid his hand gently on the bowed back.

“Who are you, friend?” He used the Galactic basic of the Service, but he was not greatly surprised when broken words came in Terran.

“Najar, Mikki Najar, Reconnaissance scout—500th Landing force.”

His voice had steadied. Now he dropped his hands and turned his head to face Hosteen directly, a puzzled expression on his features as he continued to study the Amerindian.

“Hosteen Storm, Beast Master,” Hosteen identified himself and then added, “The war is over, you know.”

Najar nodded slowly. “I know. But this is a holdout planet, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here—or is that wrong, too?”

“This is Arzor, a frontier settlement world. We had an Xik holdout pocket, yes, but cleaned it up months ago. And it was only one shipload of Xiks. Most of them blew themselves up when they tried to take off. I’m not here as a soldier—this is my home now.”

There were bitter lines about Najar’s mouth. “Just some more of Dean’s lies. You’re Terran, aren’t you?”

Hosteen nodded and then added, “Arzoran now. I’ve taken up land in the plains—”

“And this is a Confederacy settlement planet not an Xik world?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Over two hundred Terran years anyway—second and third generations from First Ship families are holding lands now. You came in on the LB?”

“Yes.” Najar’s bitterness had reached his voice now. “Lafdale was a pilot, and he was a good one—got us down without smashing up. Then we walked out straight into a native attack. They didn’t kill us—might have been better if they had—just herded us up the mountainside and put us in a cave. We lost Lafdale in an underground place full of water. He was pulled off a wharf there by something big—something we never really saw. Then”—Najar shook his head slowly from side to side—“it was a kind of nightmare. Roostav—he went missing; we never found him—that was in a cave full of broken walls. Dean kept urging us on. He was excited, said we were on to something big. And Zolti—he’d been a Histtech before the war—he said that this was a settled planet and we could find help if we could get back to the LB com. We never knew if the signals we sent at landing had ever been picked up. But Dean talked him down, said he knew where we were—right in the territory where the Xik had holdouts all over—that the hostile attitude of the natives proved we were in an Xik influence zone.”

He paused and rubbed his hand across his face. “The other two of us, Widders and I, we didn’t know what to think. Dean and Zolti, they were the big brains. Both of them said we were in a place where there was something big from the old times. And Dean—we were all out of Rehab, you know.” He glanced almost furtively at Hosteen.

“For all Terrans there was Rehab—afterwards,” the Amerindian replied soberly.

“Well, Dean, he—somehow he didn’t want to go back, back to the way he had had it before the war, I mean. He’d been pretty important in the Service, and he liked that. Maybe he was able to cover up in Rehab, but after we landed here he was a different person, excited, alive. Then he just took over, ran us—He kept insisting it was our duty to learn all we could about this place, use it against the Xiks. And he swore Zolti was mistaken, that we had been off course of any settler planet when we dropped here.

“Then we found the place of the path.” Again Najar stopped and Hosteen thought he was trying to pick words to explain something he did not understand himself.

“You found this?” The Terran sketched with a finger tip in the dust the spiral and dot.

“Yes. You must have seen it too!”

“And followed it.”

“Dean said it was a way out. I don’t know how he knew that. He picked information out of the air—or so it seemed. One minute he’d be as puzzled as we were; then all at once he’d explain—and he’d be right! Funny though, he didn’t want to try that path first. Zolti did—walked around and around—then he just wasn’t there!

“Widders, he was out of his head a little by then. Kept saying over and over that things hid behind rocks to watch us. He threw stones into every shadow. When Zolti went like that, Widders started screaming. He ran around and around the coil, hit the center—and then was gone—

“Dean took the same orbit. And I—well, I wasn’t going to stay there alone. So I did it—ended up in a three-cornered box.”

“You saw the hall of the machines?” Hosteen asked.

“Yes. Dean was there. And he was crazy-wild, running up and down, patting them and talking to himself about how all this was the place he had been meant to find—that the voices in his head had told him and that now he held the whole world right in his hand. Listening to him was like being back in Rehab in the early days. I hid out and watched him. Then he ended up in a corner where there was a big hoop—got inside that and lay down on the floor, curled up as if he were asleep. There was a light and noise—I couldn’t watch—something queer happened to your eyes when you tried to. So I went to hunt Widders and Zolti. Only, if they came that way, they were gone again. I didn’t see them—not then.”

“But you did later?”

“Maybe—one. Only nobody could be sure—just bones that looked fresh.” Najar’s eyes closed, and Hosteen felt the shudder that shook his wasted body. “I didn’t stay there to hunt. Somehow I found this valley outside—”

He looked around, gratitude mirrored in his eyes.

“It was wonderful, after all those other places, to be out in the open with things—real things—growing, almost like home. And there was a way higher up to get out—down to where the natives were. I watched them. Then all at once more and more of them kept coming, and I guessed Dean was up to something. Thunder and lightning—not the normal kind—I tried to find out what was going on, mapped some of the ways in and out—”

“You didn’t think of trying to contact Dean again?”

Najar’s gaze dropped to his hands. “No—I didn’t. You may think that’s queer, Storm. But Dean, he’d been changing all the time since we landed here. And when I saw him so wild in that hall—well, I didn’t want to have anything to do with him again. He was raving about being picked to rule a world—it was enough to make you think you were crazy, too. I didn’t want any part of him.”