The Shield of Time Read online

  “Do you mean to kill him?”

  Surprise murmured through the crackling of the flames. “What else?” Red Wolf demanded. “We cannot let a Vole man harm a man of the people and go unscathed.”

  “We should kill many of them,” Broken Blade growled.

  “No, no,” said Red Wolf. “Then how can they bring tribute? They must be quelled, but I think it will be enough to slay Aryuk.”

  “What if we fail in that?”

  “Then, true, we must avenge Running Fox on others. Let us see what happens.”

  “I wish you would stay your hands,” Corwin exclaimed. Immediately he knew what foolishness that was. He’d been thinking how Wanda would feel when she got back from the field.

  The faces before him hardened. Answerer looked up again and croaked almost gleefully, “Then you do favor the Vole People! What is between you and them? That is what Running Fox and I went to learn, and he died.”

  “Nothing,” Corwin said. “You went there for nothing. It is truth what Sun Hair and I have told you; we are only sojourners here, and in a while we shall leave forever. We only want friendship with … with everybody.”

  “You, maybe. But she?”

  “I vouch for her.” Corwin saw he’d better put up a brave front. He roughened his tone. “Hear me. Think. If we had ill intentions toward the Cloud People, need we hide it? You have seen a little of what we can do. A little.”

  Red Wolf moved his hands, a calming gesture. “Well spoken,” he said quietly. “Yet I think it best if you, Tall Man, make sure that your wife Sun Hair keeps apart from this matter.”

  “I will,” Corwin promised. “Oh, I will. She must not act. Such is the law of our tribe.”

  VIII

  Young hunters could travel swiftly. With brief stops for rest and a bite of dried meat, Red Wolf and his three companions reached Alder River the night after they left home. The moon was up, its fullness gnawed by the Dark Hare but still casting shimmer and shadow across clouds, snow, ice. The three huts crouched misshapen. Red Wolf breathed deeply and took a magic bone between his teeth before he could make himself crawl into the one whose entrance had been blocked. Inside, sightless, he laid hand on something that felt colder than the air. No stranger to death, he nonetheless jerked the hand back.

  Mastering terror, he tried once more. Yes, a face lay stiff beneath his palm. “Running Fox, this is Red Wolf come to give you your honor,” he muttered around the bone. Getting hold of the coat, he dragged the dead man forth.

  Moonlight grayed skin. Running Fox was frozen as hard as river or sea. Blood clotted black on the left temple and around the chin. Black too were the gaping mouth and the horrible twin emptinesses above.

  The hunters squatted around. “They gouged his eyes out,” whispered Broken Blade. “Why?”

  “To blind his ghost, lest it pursue them?” wondered Spearpoint.

  “Their ghosts will suffer worse,” snarled White Water.

  “Enough,” said Red Wolf. “These are unlucky things to speak of, worst by dark. We shall know more in the morning. Now let us take him from this ill place, that he may sleep among his comrades.”

  They carried the body above the ravine, put it into the bag they had brought along for it, and spread their own. Wind whittered. The moon flew between clouds. Wolf-howls afar were homelike when men heard, as well, the mumbling of the sea beyond the ice. Red Wolf drowsed off, but his dreams were jagged.

  At dawn his band cast about. The tracks they found in the snow, though days old, told a tale they understood. “Some have gone east, some west,” Red Wolf related. “Small footprints are in both sets. Those are surely Aryuk’s kin, seeking refuge till our wrath has been slaked. One trail goes inland, and is a grown man’s. That is Aryuk’s.”

  “Or somebody else’s, like a son’s?” asked Spearpoint. “They are sly beasts, those.”

  Red Wolf signed a no. “Why should a son mislead us, when we would hunt the father down too? If they meant to protect him, they would have gone at his side, ready for a fight. But they knew they would lose. Best that he die alone for what he did.” With a grin: “We will do as they wish.”

  “If he dies before we catch him, Running Fox is cheated of revenge,” Broken Blade fretted.

  “Then he shall have it tenfold on the other Voles,” White Water vowed.

  Red Wolf scowled. Punishment was one thing, no different from slaying a dangerous animal. Slaughter of the harmless was something else, like killing animals without need of their skin, flesh, gut, or bone. No good would come of it. “We shall see,” he replied. “White Water, do you and Spearpoint carry Running Fox back to his burial. Broken Blade and I will settle with Aryuk.” He gave no time for talk about that, but struck out at once. The quarry had a long head start.

  Otherwise there was little more to fear than evil spirits and whatever uncanny powers Aryuk possessed. Red Wolf doubted he had any. The hunters were paired only because the trail might grow difficult and because it was seldom wise to travel partnerless.

  The tracks led north. As the shore dropped from sight behind him, Red Wolf saw that he followed a man who had already begun to weaken. Answerer’s story had been confused, but the shaman thought Aryuk took a blow before felling his enemy. The heart laughed in Red Wolf’s breast.

  The brief day ended. For a while he and Broken Blade pushed on. If they looked closely they could still trace the spoor by starlight and, later, moonlight. It went slowly, but that did not matter, for they saw how Aryuk had grown slower yet and ever oftener must stop to rest.

  Then clouds drew together, smothering sight. Perforce the hunters called a halt. Without fire, they ate of their jerky and rolled up in their sleeping robes. The softest of touches on his face roused Red Wolf. Snowfall. Father of Wolves, make this cease, he begged.

  It did not. Morning was hushed and gray, skyless, full of white flakes through which men could barely see a spearcast’s length. For some time they were able to creep onward, brushing the powdery new snow off the old, but at last that was impossible. “We have lost him,” sighed Broken Blade. “Now his tribe must pay.”

  “Maybe not,” responded Red Wolf, who had been thinking. “We cannot be far behind him. He may well be on the other side of the next hill. Let us abide.”

  The air had warmed sufficiently that they could sit almost in comfort. Lynx-patient, they waited.

  About midday the snowfall ended. They went on north. The going was hard, through stuff light but ankle-deep, sometimes knee-deep. Would that I had magical shoes to walk on top of this, Red Wolf thought. Do Tall Man and Sun Hair? They own so much else that is wonderful … Well, Aryuk is hindered too, worse than us.

  From a ridge they saw hugely ahead, across the steppe. Clouds had parted and shadows reached long and blue over purity. Every bush and boulder stood marked. Right, left, forward the men peered, until Broken Blade pointed and cried, “Yonder!”

  Red Wolf’s heart jumped. “Maybe. Come.” They struggled downslope. By the time they reached what they had glimpsed, the sun was gone, but some light remained by which to read the troubled snow.

  “Yes, a man,” said Red Wolf. “Surely no long way off. See how he floundered and … yes, here he stumbled, fell, and picked himself up awkwardly.” His mittened hand tensed on the spearshaft. “He is ours.”

  They went on at an easier pace than before, saving their strength, less for the prey than for the trek home afterward. Night rolled across the world. The sky was mostly clear, the moon still down; stars were soon aswarm, frost-sharp. The trail stayed plain.

  Suddenly Broken Blade stopped short. Red Wolf heard his gasp and likewise looked up. Above the northern horizon, the Winter Hunters were kindling their fires.

  In billows and rays light shivered aloft, brighter, higher, brighter, higher, until it licked at the roof of heaven. Cold had deepened and all sound lay frozen. Only the sheen of light on snow was alive. Awed beyond terror, the men stared. There danced the mightiest of their forebears, ghosts too stron
g for earth to hold them.

  “Yet you are ours,” Red Wolf breathed at last. “You remember, do you not? Watch over us. Ward us. Keep horrors and vengeful ghosts from us, your sons. In your name, for you, we make our kill tonight.”

  “I think they have come for that,” said Broken Blade as low.

  “We should not keep them waiting.” Red Wolf moved onward.

  Presently he saw something, a blot on the snow beneath the chill fires. He hastened his stride. The other must have seen him in turn, for a shrill, keening chant reached his ears. What, did Vole men also sing their death songs?

  As he neared, he made Aryuk out, seated cross-legged in a hollow he had scooped for himself. “I will do this, Broken Blade,” Red Wolf said. “Running Fox was close to my spirit.” He went on as if no fresh snow burdened his feet.

  Aryuk rose. He moved very slowly, clumsily, his last strength spent. But he never cringed. He finished his song and stood slump-shouldered, left arm lashed to his side below the skin cloak, yet steadfast. Frost whitened his beard. When Red Wolf drew nigh, he smiled.

  Smiled.

  Red Wolf halted. What was this? What might it portend?

  The silent fires burned overhead, commanding him. He took another step, and another.

  Here is no animal brought to bay, he knew. Aryuk is ready for death. Well, he shall have it as easily as I can give it. He has earned that much.

  Two-handed, he thrust the spear. Bone and keen flint went in below the breast and up to find the heart. The blow felt oddly soft, into so worn and wasted a body. Aryuk toppled before it, onto his back. Once he kicked, and his throat rattled. Then he was quiet.

  Red Wolf withdrew the spear and leaned on it, staring downward. Broken Blade joined him. The flames leaped and shook in heaven.

  “It is done,” said Broken Blade finally, tonelessly.

  “Not altogether,” answered Red Wolf.

  He took the graven bone from his pouch and clamped it between his teeth. Kneeling, he opened Aryuk’s pouch. Nothing was in it but—yes—He drew out the eyes of Running Fox. “You shall go back to him,” he promised. Giving them to Broken Blade: “Wrap these well and sing them the Spirit Song. I have other tasks.”

  Even for one who knew he was doomed and who was emptied by weariness, Aryuk died calmly. Almost happily, as far as I could tell by this witch-light. What did he know? What did he mean to do … later?

  Well, he shall not. Answerer has told me how to bind a ghost.

  Red Wolf did to the body what had been done to Running Fox’s. He crushed the eyeballs between two stones he dug from the snow. He slit the belly and laid more stones among the entrails. He tied wrists and ankles with thongs of wolverine leather. He drove a spear through the chest and out the back, as deeply into the ice beneath as he could. He danced around the corpse while he called on his namesake, the Father of Wolves, to send more wolves—and foxes, weasels, owls, ravens, all manner of carrion eaters—to devour it.

  “Now it is done,” he said. “Come.”

  He felt exhausted himself; but he would walk as long as he was able before he slept. When morning came, he and Broken Blade ought to spy a landmark, such as a distant mountain, and find their way home.

  They set forth across the steppe, beneath the spirit fires.

  IX

  To Wanda Tamberly, over the months the old rogue mammoth had come to be like a friend. She almost hated to bid him goodbye. But now he’d given her what information he could, which might well include a key to the entire history of Beringia. If she hoped to learn more about other aspects, she’d better get busy on them. “Already” her superiors wanted her elsewhere and elsewhen. It was with difficulty, as messages went to and fro across space-time, that she had persuaded them to let her spend just a bit more lifespan here, finish out the season and observe one last interstadial spring. She suspected that they suspected her real reason was to see, in daily detail, how her Tulat would fare.

  Not that genuine science did not remain to be done, man-centuries’ worth of it. She had heard that civilian researchers made studies of their own, both pastward and futureward of this period. But they came from civilizations uptime of hers, too alien for her ever to work with them. She was of the Patrol, whose concern was with things impinging directly on human affairs.

  There were advantages to that, she often reflected. The real comprehension of an ecology lay in its foundations, geology, meteorology, chemistry, microbes, plants, worms, insects, humble small vertebrates. She got to trail the big glamorous creatures near the top of the food chain. Of course, she too must gather a lot of nitty-gritty data. In a general way, she oversaw the activities of the tiny robots that scuttled beetlelike about, sampling, observing, passing information on to the computer in her dome. But she also followed slot, examined scat, watched from a distance or from a blind, punted around lakes, mingled with herds; and that was fine, fun, real.

  I’ll be sorry to leave for good. Although—her spine tingled—next assignment, Crô-Magnon Europe?

  She had made this trip alone. Wanayimo guides were often invaluable, much better than any Tulat before them, but must not be exposed to really high tech. Loaded with camp gear, her timecycle rose on antigravity till it hung high. Instruments gave her a final look around. Their sensitivity and versatility were part of the reason that she, all by herself, could report on an entire region after a couple of years’ work. Overleaping miles, piercing mists, amplifying light, they spotted single animals and brought views as magnified as she wanted before her eyes. Musk oxen stood back to the wind, a hare lolloped through drifting snow, a ptarmigan took wing, and yonder wandered and grumbled the old mammoth….

  Upon the vast white land, his shagginess was dark as the cliffs rearing northward. His one tusk scuffed snow off moss and his trunk grubbed the fodder. It was sparse, but the best that a solitary male, defeated in fight and driven from his fellows, could find. Sometimes Tamberly had thought that mercy required she shoot him. No, he was providing an important clue; and now that she had it, well, leave him in his gaunt pride. Who knew, he might survive into summer and fill his belly again.

  “Thanks, Jumbo,” she called across the wind. She believed she had discovered why his kind were growing scarce in Beringia, while continuing common in both Siberia and North America. Though the land bridge was still hundreds of miles wide, rising sea level had shrunk it, even as encroaching birch scrub changed the nature of the steppe. She hadn’t known that these elephantines were so dependent on specific conditions. Elsewhere, related species occupied a variety of habitats. But the rogue had not gone south to the seaboard woods and grasslands, he had gone north to scrape out a marginal existence under the mountains.

  This in turn bore implications that excited Ralph Corwin. Although the Paleo-Indians hunted game of every sort, mammoth was the prize. In Beringia they’d wipe out the already threatened herds of any given area in the course of a few generations; it is another myth that primitive man lives in harmonious balance with the life around him. The presence of mammoth farther east would then draw adventurous persons onward sooner than would otherwise have been the case, in spite of today’s Alaska being for the most part pretty desolate.

  Therefore, probably the migration into America went more quickly than he had supposed, and later waves of it had a distinctly different character from their predecessors…. However, this couldn’t account for the Cloud People moving away as early as next year….

  The wind swirled and bit. Vapors blew around her, gray rags. Let’s get back and put our feet up with a nice hot cuppa. Tamberly set controls and activated.

  In her dome she dismounted, shoved the hopper into its place amidst the kipple, and switched off the antigrav. The machine thumped a few inches down onto the floor. She rubbed her bottom. Hoo boy, the saddle was cold! Next job, if it’s Ice Age too, first I put in for heating coils.

  As she stripped, sponge-bathed, donned loose clothes, she wondered what to do about Corwin. Presumably he was elsewhere. Were h
e in his own place, his timecycle would have registered this arrival of hers and he’d doubtless have popped right over with an invitation to a drink and dinner. It would be hard to decline gracefully when she’d been gone for ten days. So far she’d managed to get him talking about himself, which diverted his attention and was, she admitted, by no means uninteresting. Sooner or later, though, he was pretty sure to make a serious pass, and in that she was posolutely not interested. How to avoid an unpleasant scene?

  Too bad Manse isn’t an anthropologist. He’s comfort-able to be with, like an old shoe—a shoe that’s hiked a lot of very strange trails, and stayed sturdy. I wouldn’t need to worry about him. If perchance he did make a pass—Hey, I’m not blushing, am I?

  She brewed her tea and settled down. A voice at the entrance broke through: “Hullo, Wanda. How’ve you done?”

  I guess he was just down in the village. Damn. “Okay,” she called. “Uh, look, I’m awfully tired, lousy company. Could I rest up till tomorrow?”

  “’Fraid not.” The solemnity sounded honest. “Bad news.”

  An icicle stabbed. She got to her feet. “Coming.”

  “I think you’d best step outside. I’ll wait.” And only the wind sounded.

  She scrambled into wool socks, down-lined pants, boots, parka. When she emerged, the wind cut at her. It drove ice-dust low across the ground. Sinking behind southern hills, the sun ignited a multitudinous hard glitter in the drift. Also dressed for the weather, Corwin and Red Wolf stood side by side. Their countenances were stark.

  “Good fortune to you,” Tamberly greeted through the whistling.

  “Good spirits travel with you,” the Cloud man answered as formally and flatly.

  “This tale is for Red Wolf to tell,” Corwin stated in the same language. “He told me he should. When I knew you had returned, I fetched him.”