“But they don’t take illogical vengeance as a human would. That is, they wouldn’t destroy a tribe just because it happened to be loved by you. No, they must have had a good reason—to them, anyway—for doing this.”
“Perhaps they wanted to make sure I didn’t take refuge here,” he said. “They would have been smarter to have waited until I did and then move in.”
They could be hiding someplace up on the mountains where they could observe everything.
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However, Kickaha insisted on scouting the area before he approached the village. If Bellers were spying on them, they were well concealed indeed. In fact, since the heat-and-mass detector on the craft indicated nothing except some small animals and birds, the Bellers would have to be behind something large. In which case, they couldn’t see their quarry either.
It was more probably that the Seller machine, after destroying the village, had searched this area. Failing to find him, it had gone elsewhere.
“I’ll take over the controls,” Anana said softly. “You tell me how to get to Podarge.”
He was still too sluggish to react to her unusual solicitude. Later, he would think about it.
Now he told her to go to the edge of the level again and to descend about fifty thousand feet. Then she was to take the craft westward at 150 MPH until he told her to stop.
The trip was silent except for the howling of the wind at the open rear end. Not until the machine stopped below an enormous overhang of shiny black rock did he speak.
“I could have buried the bodies,” he said, “but it would have taken too long. The Bellers might have checked back.”
“You’re still thinking about them,” she said with a trace of incredulity. ” I mean, you’ re worrying because you couldn’t keep the carrion eaters off them? Don’t! They’ re dead; you can do nothing for them.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “When I called them my people, I meant it. I loved them, and they loved me. They were a strange people when I first met them, strange to me. I was a young, mid-twentieth century, Midwestern
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American citizen, from another universe, in fact. And they were descendants of Amerinds who had been brought to this universe some twenty thousand years ago. Even the ways of an Indian of America are alien and near-incomprehensible to a white American. But I’m very adaptable and flexible. I learned their ways and came to think something like them. I was at ease with them and they with me. And I was Kickaha, the Trickster, the man of many turns. Their Kickaha, the scourge of the enemy of the Bear People.
“This village was my home, and they were my friends, the best I’ve ever had, and I also had two beautiful and loving wives. No children, though Awiwisha thought she might be pregnant. It’s true that I’d established other identities on two other levels, especially that of the outlaw Baron Horst von Horstmann. But that was fading away. I’d been gone so long from Dracheland.
“The Hrowakas were my people, dammit! I loved them, and they loved me!”
And then he began to sob loudly. The cries tore the flesh as they mounted upward with spurs toward his throat. And even after he had quit crying, he hurt from deep within him. He did not want to move for fear he would hurt even more. But Anana finally cleared her throat and moved uneasily.
Then he said, “All right. I’m better. Set her down on that ledge there. The entrance to Podarge’s cave is about ten miles westward. It’ll be dangerous to get near it any time, but especially at night. The only time I was there was two or three years ago when Wolff and I talked Podarge into letting us out of her cage.”
He grinned and said, “The price was that I should make love to her. Other captives had been
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required to do this, too, but a lot of them couldn’t because they were too frightened, or too repulsed or both. When this happened, she’d shred them as if they were paper with her great sharp talons,