Beast Master's Planet: Omnibus of Beast Master and Lord of Thunder (Beastmaster) (26 page)

Brad Quade crossed the path of the light, knelt beside the aper. He turned the man over, felt for a heartbeat beneath the torn shirt.

“He is not dead.” Storm’s voice was thin and faraway even in his own ears. “And he is truly Xik—”

He saw Quade rise quickly, come toward him. Tired as he was, the Terran could not bear to have the other touch him. He drew away from the wall, to avoid Quade’s outstretched hand. But this time his will did not command his body and he crumpled, one hand falling across Bister’s inert body as he went down.

The picture had been part of Storm’s dreams. Yet now that he opened his eyes and lay without strength to move on the narrow bed, it was still there, covering one wall with a bold sweep of colors he knew and loved. There were the squared mesa of the southwestern desert on his own world, above that the symmetrical rounded cloud domes first developed by Dineh painters when they worked with sand as their only material. And there was a wind blowing about that mesa. The Terran could almost feel it as he saw the hair of the painted riders whipped about their faces, the manes of their spotted ponies pulled across their eyes. The mural covered the wall beside his bed and Storm slept with his head turned toward it so that those riders in the wind were the first thing he saw when he had strength enough to raise his heavy eyelids. The artist who had created that scene had ridden in the desert winds of home, been torn by their force, had known well the scent of wool
and sage, of twisted pine, and the dull, sun-heated sand. To watch that painting was like waking under the pine tree in the cavern of the gardens, and yet this was more closely Storm’s than the tree, the grass, the flowering things of his lost earth. Because this was a thing of beauty brought to life by one of his own blood. Only an artist of the Dineh could have pictured this—

The painted wall was far more real to him just then than those who came to tend his body. For Storm, the medic from the port and the silent, dark-faced woman who came and went were both shadows without substance. Nor was he able to emerge from his picture-world to answer Kelson’s questions when the Peace Officer had appeared beside his bed—the Arzoran was far less distinct to Storm than the nearest spotted pony. He did not know where he was, nor did he care. He was content to share his waking hours and his longer periods of dreaming with the riders on the wall.

But at last those periods of wakefulness grew longer. The dark woman insisted upon piling pillows to bolster his shoulders, lifting him so that he could not watch the wall in comfort. And he realized that she spoke to him shortly, even sharply, in the Dineh tongue, as one might who was impatient with a child proving stubborn. Storm tried to cling to his languid dreams—only to have them torn from him abruptly when Logan limped in. The mask of bruises had faded from the other’s face, so that Storm traced there something more than just the signature of Dineh blood, a teasing resemblance to a memory he could not quite recall.

“You like it?” The younger Quade looked beyond Storm to the mural, that section of Terran desert, untamed, but captured for all time on an Arzoran wall.

“It is home—” Storm answered truthfully and knew how revealing both words and tone were.

“That is what my father thinks—”

Brad Quade! Storm’s right hand moved across the blanket that covered him, its thin brownness crossing one familiar stripe to the next. His covering was Na-Ta-Hay’s legacy, or if not, one enough like it to be its twin. Na-Ta-Hay and the oath he had demanded of Storm—and Brad Quade’s death lay at the core of that oath.

The Terran lay hoping for the familiar spur of anger to toughen
his resolution. But it did not come. It was as if he could feel only one thing now—longing for that pictured land. Yet even if there was no anger to back it, the oath still rested on him and he must do what he had come to Arzor—

Storm had half-forgotten Logan, but now the younger man rose from the chair he had chosen and moved forward to the mural, his eyes on those wind-battered riders. There was a shade of wistfulness in his face, and none could ever doubt his kinship with the men pictured there.

“What was it like?” he asked abruptly. “How did it make a man feel to ride so across that country?” Then he was conscious of the hurt that memory might deal, and a darker flood crept up his clean jawline. He turned his head to the bed, his eyes troubled.

“I left that life,” Storm picked his words with care, “when I was a child. Twice I returned—it was never the same. But it stays, deep in one’s mind it continues to live. The one who painted that—for him it lived. Even here, far across the star lanes, it lived!”

“For her—” Logan corrected softly.

Storm sat up, away from his bolstering pillows. He could not know how stone-hard his face had become. He did not have a chance to voice his question.

Another stood in the doorway, the big man with the compelling blue eyes, the man Storm had come to find and yet did not want to meet. Brad Quade walked to the foot of the bed and looked down at the Terran measuringly. And Storm knew that this was to be the last meeting of all, that in spite of his queer inner reluctance, he must force the issue and be ready to face the consequences.

With some of his old speed of action the Terran’s hand went out, caught at the knife in Logan’s belt, and jerked it free, resting the blade across his knee, its point significantly toward Brad Quade.

Those blue eyes did not change. The settler might have been expecting that very move. Or else he did not understand what it implied. But that Storm did not believe.

He was right! Quade knew—accepted the challenge—or at least recognized the reason for it, for the other was speaking:

“If there is steel between us, boy, why did you bring me out of the Nitra camp?”

“A life for a life until our last accounting. You kept the blade out of my back at the Crossing. A warrior of the Dineh pays his debts. I come from Na-Ta-Hay. Upon Na-Ta-Hay and upon his family you have set the dishonor of blood spilled—and other shame—”

Brad Quade did not move, except to step closer to the foot of the bed. When Logan stirred, he signaled with his hand in an imperative order that kept his son where he was.

“There is and was no blood spilled between the family of Na-Ta-Hay and me,” he replied deliberately. “And certainly no shame!”

Storm was chilled. He had never believed that Quade would deny his guilt when they at last faced each other. From his first sight of the settler he had granted him the virtue of honesty.

“What of Nahani?” he asked coldly.

“Nahani!” Quade was startled. He leaned forward, his big brown hands grasping the footrail of the bed, breathing a little faster as if he had come running to this meeting. And Storm could not mistake the genuine surprise in his tone.

“Nahani,” repeated the Terran deliberately. Then struck by a possible explanation for the other’s bewilderment, he added:

“Or did you never know the name of the man you killed at Los Gatos—?”

“Los Gatos?” Brad Quade stooped, as if striving to bring his blue eyes on a level with the dark ones Storm raised to meet them. “Who—are—you?” He spaced those words with little breaths between, as if each were forced from him by that sharp point still in Storm’s hold.

“I am Hosteen Storm—Nahani’s son—Na-Ta-Hay’s grandson—”

Brad Quade’s lips moved as if he were trying to shape words, and finally they came:

“But he told us—told Raquel—that you were dead—of fever! She—she had to remember that all the rest of her life! She went back to the mesa for you and Na-Ta-Hay showed her a walled-up cave—said you were buried in it—That nearly killed her, too!” Brad Quade whirled, his broad shoulders undefended to Storm’s attack. He balled his hands into fists, brought them down against the wall as if he were battering something else, a shadow not concrete enough to take the punishment he craved to deal out.

“Blast him! He tortured her on purpose! How could he do that to his own daughter?”

Storm watched that sudden rage die as Quade’s control snapped into place. The fist became a hand again, reached out to touch with delicate tenderness, the edge of the mural.

“How could he do it? Even if he were such a fanatic—” Quade asked again, wonderingly. “Nahani wasn’t killed—at least by me. He died of snake bite. I don’t know what you’ve been told—a twisted story apparently—” He spoke quietly and Storm slumped back against his pillows, his world unsteady. He could not fan dead anger to life. Quade’s sober voice carried too much conviction.

“Nahani was attached to the Survey Service,” Quade said tiredly. He pulled a chair to him, dropped into it, still eyeing Storm with a kind of hungry demand for belief. “I was, too, then. We worked together on several assignments—and our Amerindian background led us to close friendship. There was trouble with the Xik on some of the outer planets and Nahani was captured in one of their sneak raids. He escaped and I went to see him at the base hospital. But they had tried to ‘condition’ him—”

Storm tensed and shivered. Quade, seeing his reaction, nodded.

“Yes, you can understand what that meant. It was bad—he was—changed. The medic thought perhaps something could be done for him on Terra. He was sent home for rehabilitation. But during the first month, he got away from the hospital—disappeared. We learned later that he made his way back to his own home. His wife and son were there, a two-year-old child.

“Outwardly he appeared normal. His wife’s father—Na-Ta-Hay—was one of the irreconcilables who refused to acknowledge any change or need for change in the native way of life. He was fanatic almost past the point of strict sanity. And he welcomed Nahani back as one rescued from the disaster of becoming Terran in place of Dineh. But Raquel, Nahani’s wife, knew that he must have expert help. She got word of his whereabouts to the authorities without her father’s knowledge. I was asked to go with the medic to pick him up because I was on leave and I was his friend—they hoped I could persuade him to come in peaceably for treatment.

“When he discovered we were coming, he went on the run again.
Raquel and I followed him into the desert. When we found his hidden camp, he was already dead—of snake bite. And when Raquel returned to her father’s place for her baby, he was like a wild man—he accused her of betraying her husband, of turning traitor to her people, and drove her off with a gun.

“She came to me for help, and with guards we went to get her child—only to be shown a grave, the walled-up cave. Raquel collapsed and was ill for months. Afterwards we were married, I resigned from the service and brought her to my home here, hoping in new surroundings she could forget. I think she was happy—especially after Logan was born. But she only lived four years—And that is the true story!”

The knife lay by itself on the blanket. Storm’s hands were over his eyes, shutting out the room, allowing him to see into a place that was dark and alive with an odd danger he must face by himself, as he faced Bister back at the Peaks.

A blurred column of years stretched out behind him—separating him from that long-ago day when Na-Ta-Hay had impressed his bitter will upon a small awed boy to whom his grandfather was as tall and powerful as one of the fabled Old Ones—between now and the day just after he had landed at the Center when Na-Ta-Hay’s spirit seemed to spread like a shadow across all his memories and dreams of Terra, his now destroyed homeland. He had clung to that shadow of a man, and to the oath he had given, making them anchors in a reeling world. Storm had fostered a hatred of Quade because he had to have some purpose in life, though even then something deep within him had tried to repudiate it. He saw it all now—so clearly.

That was why he had shrunk from pressing the dispute at his first meeting with the settler. As long as he could postpone this settlement, so could he continue to live. After it, his life would no longer have any purpose.

Na-Ta-Hay had stood in his memory as a symbol for all that was lost. To cling to the task the other had set him had, in a strange way, kept Terra alive. They had been right at the Center in their distrust of him, he had
not
escaped the madness of the worldless men, only his had taken another and stranger turn.

Now he was empty, empty and waiting for the fear that lurked just beyond the broken barrier to crawl in and possess him utterly. Na-Ta-Hay had left him no anchor, only delusion. Now he stood on the same narrow edge of sanity where Bister had walked. For his kind, like Bister,
had
to have roots. Roots of a land—of kin—

Storm did not know he was shivering, huddling down into his pillows, seeking oblivion, which would not come. His hands dropped from his face to lie limp on the lightning patterned slashes of the blanket, but he did not open his eyes. For he felt he dared not see that mural now, nor look at the man who had told the truth and made him face his own complete loss.

Warmth ringed his wrists, fingers tightened there as if to drag him out of the encroaching darkness.

“Here, too, is the family—”

At first the words were only sounds—then the meaning came, the words repeated themselves in his empty mind. Storm opened his eyes.

“How did you know?” He begged assurance that true understanding of what he needed had prompted the choice of just those words, not chance.

“How did
I
know?” Brad Quade was smiling. “Are the Dineh the only wise ones, son? Is there only one tribe who seek roots in their own earth? This was your home—always waiting. Your mother helped to make it. You have merely been a little late in arriving—about—let me see now—some eighteen Terran years!”

Storm did not try to answer that. His eyes went once more to the mural. But now it was only a painted wall, nostalgic, beautiful, not meant to hold a man in spell. He heard a quiet laugh from the doorway and glanced up. Logan must have gone—now he was back. He stood there with Baku riding his shoulder as she had so often ridden Storm’s, with Surra flowing about his legs. The big cat came and put her forepaws on the bed and surveyed Storm round-eyed, while Hing chittered from the crook of Logan’s arm.

“Rain is in the corral. He’ll have to wait a few more days for your reunion—” Brad did not yet loose his hold on Storm’s wrists. “Here is your family—this is also the truth!”