A Heritage of Stars (14 page)

“She is a part of me,” he'd say. “I cannot tell you how, but unspoken between us is an understanding that cannot be described.”

And while he talked, of her or of other things, she sat at the campfire with the rest of them, relaxed, at peace, her hands folded in her lap, at times her head bent almost as if in prayer, at other times lifted and held high, giving the impression that she was staring, not out into the darkness only but into another world, another place or time. On the march, she moved lightly of foot—there were times when she seemed to float rather than to walk—serene and graceful, and more than graceful, a seeming to be full of grace, a creature set apart, a wild sprite that was human in a tantalizing way, a strange, concentrated essence of humanity that stood and moved apart from the rest of them, not because she wished to do so but because she had to do so. She seldom spoke. When she did speak, it was usually to her grandfather. It was not that she ignored the rest of them but that she seldom felt the need to speak to them. When she spoke, her words were clear and gentle, perfectly and correctly spoken, not the jargon or the mumbling of the mentally deficient, which she at times appeared to be, leaving all of them wondering if she were or not, and, if so, what kind of direction the deficiency might take.

Meg was with her often, or she with Meg. Watching the two of them together, walking together or sitting together, Cushing often tried to decide which of them it was who was with the other. He could not decide; it was as if some natural magnetic quality pulled the two of them together, as if they shared some common factor that made them move to each other. Not that they ever really met; distance, of a sort, always separated them. Meg might speak occasionally to Elayne, but not often, respecting the silence that separated them—or the silence that, at times, could make them one. Elayne, for her part, spoke no oftener to Meg than she did to any of the others.

“The wrongness of her, if there is a wrongness,” Meg once said to Cushing, “is the kind of wrongness that more of us should have.”

“She lives within herself,” said Cushing.

“No,” said Meg. “She lives outside herself. Far outside herself.”

When they reached the river, they set up camp in a grove of cottonwoods growing on a bank that rose a hundred feet or so above the stream, a pleasant place after the long trek across the barren prairie. Here, for a week, they rested. There were deer in the breaks of the bluffs that rimmed the river's eastern edge. The lowlands swarmed with prairie chicken and with ducks that paddled in the little ponds. There were catfish in the river. They lived well now, after scanty fare.

Ezra established rapport with a massive cottonwood that bore the scars of many seasons, standing for hours on end, facing the tree and embracing it, communing with it while its wind-stirred leaves seemed to murmur to him. So long as he was there, Elayne was there as well, sitting a little distance off, cross-legged on the ground, the moth-eaten elkskin pulled up about her head, her hands folded in her lap. At times, Shivering Snake deserted Rollo and stayed with her, spinning and dancing all about her. She paid it no more attention than the rest of them. At other times, the Followers, purple blobs of shadow, sat in a circle about her, like so many wolves waiting for a feast, and she paid them no more attention than she paid Shivering Snake. Watching her, Cushing had the startling thought that she paid them no attention because she had recognized them for what they were and dismissed them from her thoughts.

Rollo hunted grizzly, and for a couple of days Cushing went out to help him hunt. But there were no grizzlies; there were no bear of any kind.

“The oil is almost gone,” wailed Rollo. “I'm already getting squeaky. Conserving it, I use less than I should.”

“The deer I killed was fat,” said Cushing.

“Tallow!” Rollo cried. “Tallow I won't use.”

“When the oil is gone, you'll damn well use whatever comes to hand. You should have killed a bear back on the Minnesota. There were a lot of them.”

“I waited for the grizzly. And now there are no grizzlies.”

“That's all damn foolishness,” said Cushing. “Grizzly oil is no different from the oil from any other bear. You're not clear out, are you?”

“Not entirely. But nothing in reserve.”

“We'll find grizzly west of the river,” said Cushing.

Andy had eaten the scant bitter prairie grass in the East with reluctance, consuming only enough of it to keep life within his body. Now he stood knee-deep in the lush grass of the valley. With grunts of satisfaction, his belly full to bulging, he luxuriated by rolling on the sandy beach that ran up from the river's edge, while killdeer and sandpiper, outraged by his invasion of their domain, went scurrying and complaining up and down the sands.

Later Andy helped Rollo and Cushing haul in driftwood deposited by earlier floods on the banks along the river. Out of the driftwood Cushing and Rollo constructed a raft, chopping the wood into proper lengths and lashing the pieces together as securely as possible with strips of green leather cut from the hides of deer. When they crossed the river, Rollo and Meg rode the raft—Meg because she couldn't swim, Rollo because he was afraid of getting wet since his oil supply was low. The others clung to the raft. It helped them with their swimming and they tried as best they could to drive it across the stream and keep it from floating too far down the river. Andy, hesitant to enter the swift-flowing water, finally plunged in and swam so lustily that he outdistanced them and was waiting for them on the other side, nickering companionably at them when they arrived.

Since that mid-morning hour, they had climbed steadily. Ezra, for once, had not insisted on stopping to talk with plants. Behind them the river had receded slowly; ahead of them the great purple upthrust never seemed closer.

Cushing walked down the short slope of ground to reach the evening fire. Tomorrow, he thought, tomorrow we may reach the top.

Five days later, from far off, they sighted Thunder Butte. It was no more than a smudge on the northern horizon, but the smudge, they knew, could be nothing other than the butte; there was nothing else in this flat emptiness that could rise up to make a ripple on the smooth circle of horizon.

Cushing said to Meg, “We've made it. We'll be there in a few more days. I wonder what we'll find.”

“It doesn't matter, laddie boy,” she told him. “It's been a lovely trip.”

16

Three days later, with Thunder Butte looming large against the northern sky, they found the wardens waiting for them. The five wardens sat their horses at the top of a slight billowing rise, and when Cushing and the others approached them, one of them rode forward, his left hand lifted, open-palmed, in a sign of peace.

“We are the wardens,” he said. “We keep the faith. We mount guard against wanderers and troublemakers.”

He didn't look much like a warden, although Cushing was not quite sure how a warden should look. The warden looked very much like a nomad who had fallen on hard times. He carried no spear, but there was a quiver resting on his back, with a short bow tucked in among the arrows. He wore woolen trousers, out at the knees and ragged at the cuffs. He had no jacket, but a leather vest that had known better days. His horse was a walleyed mustang that at one time might have had the devil in him, but was now so broken down that he was beyond all menace.

The other four, sitting their nags a few paces off, looked in no better shape.

“We are neither wanderers nor troublemakers,” Cushing said, “so you have no business with us. We know where we are going and we want no trouble.”

“Then you had best veer off,” the warden said. “If you go closer to the butte, you will be causing trouble.”

“This is Thunder Butte?” asked Cushing.

“That is what it is,” the warden said. “You should have known that if you had been watching it this morning. There was a great black cloud passing over it, with lightning licking at its top, and the thunder rolling.”

“We saw it,” Cushing said. “We wondered if that is how it got its name.”

“Day after day,” the warden said, “there is this great black cloud.…”

“What we saw this morning,” said Cushing, “was no more than a thunderstorm that missed us, passing to the north.”

“You mistake me, friend,” the warden said. “It's best we palaver.” He made a sign to the other four and slid down off his horse. He ambled forward and squatted. “You might as well hunker down,” he said, “and let us have a talk.”

The other four came up and hunkered down beside him. The first man's horse wandered back to join its fellows.

“Well, all right,” said Cushing, “we'll sit awhile with you, if that is what you want. But we can't stay long. We have miles to cover.”

“This one?” asked the warden, making a thumb at Rollo. “I never saw one like him before.”

“He's all right,” said Cushing. “You have no need to worry.”

Looking at the five of them more closely, he saw that except for one roly-poly man, the rest of them were as gaunt and grim as scarecrows, as if they had been starved almost to emaciation. Their faces were little more than skulls with brown, parchmentlike skin stretched tightly over bone. Their arms and legs were pipestems.

From the slight rise of ground, Thunder Butte could be plainly seen, a dominate feature that rose above all the terrible flatness. Around its base ran a darker ring that must be the trees that Rollo had said formed a protective circle about it—and more than likely Ezra's trees as well, although perhaps not exactly the kind of trees that Ezra claimed the sunflowers and the other plants had told him.

“This morning,” Cushing said to the squatting wardens, “through the glasses, I caught a glimpse of whiteness at the very top of Thunder Butte. They had the look of buildings, but I could not be certain. Do you know if there are buildings up there?”

“There are magic habitations,” said the spokesman of the group. “There sleep the creatures that will follow men.”

“How do you mean, ‘will follow men'?”

“When men are gone, they will come forth and take the place of men. Or, if they wake first, even before the last of men are gone, they will come forth and displace men. They will sweep men off the earth and take their place.”

“You say that you are wardens,” Meg said to them. “Do you mean you guard these creatures, that you keep them free of interference?”

“Should anyone approach too closely,” said the warden, “they might awake. And we do not want them to awake. We want them to sleep on. For, once they wake and emerge, men's days on Earth are numbered.”

“And you are on patrol to warn anyone who comes too close?”

“For centuries on centuries,” said the warden, “we have kept patrol. This is but one patrol; there are many others. It takes a great many of us to warn wanderers away. That is why we stopped you. You had the appearance of heading for the butte.”

“That is right,” said Cushing. “We are heading for the butte.”

“There is no use of going there,” the warden said. “You can never reach the butte. The Trees won't let you through. And even if the Trees don't stop you, there are other things that will. There are rocks to break your bones.…”

“Rocks!” cried Meg.

“Yes, rocks. Living rocks that keep watch with the Trees.”

“There, you see!” Meg said to Cushing. “Now we know where that boulder came from.”

“But that was five hundred miles away,” said Cushing. “What would a rock be doing there?”

“Five hundred miles is a long way,” said the warden, “but the rocks do travel. You say you found a living rock? How could you know it was a living rock? They aren't any different; they look like any other rock.”

“I could tell,” said Meg.

“The Trees shall let us through,” said Ezra. “I shall talk with them.”

“Hush, Grandfather,” said Elayne. “These gentlemen have a reason for not wanting us to go there. We should give them hearing.”

“I have already told you,” said the warden, “we fear the Sleepers will awake. For centuries we have watched—we and those other generations that have gone before us. The trust is handed on, from a father to his son. There are old stories, told centuries ago, about the Sleepers and what will happen when they finish out their sleep. We keep the ancient faith.…”

The words rolled on—the solemn, dedicated words of a man sunk deep in faith. The words, thought Cushing, paying slight attention to them, of a sect that had twisted an ancient fable into a body of belief and a dedication that made them owe their lives to the keeping of that mistake.

The sun was sinking in the west and its slanting light threw the landscape into a place of tangled shadows. Beyond the rise on which they squatted, a deep gully slashed across the land, and along the edges of it grew thick tangles of plum trees. In the far distance a small grove of trees clustered, perhaps around a prairie pond. But except for the gully and its bushes and the stand of distant trees, the land was a gentle ocean of dried and withered grass that ran in undulating waves toward the steep immensity of Thunder Butte.

Cushing rose from where he had been squatting and moved over to one side of the two small groups facing one another. Rollo, who had not squatted with the others but had remained standing a few paces to the rear, moved over to join him.

“Now what?” the robot asked.

“I'm not sure,” said Cushing. “I don't want to fight them. From the way they act, they don't want any fighting, either. We could just settle down, I suppose, and try to wear them out with waiting, but I don't think that would work. And there's no arguing with them. They are calm and conceited fanatics who believe in what they're doing.”

“They aren't all that tough,” said Rollo. “With a show of force …”