“See, he has—” the Trader began with a kind of triumph, then he held the wire closer to his eyes. Dropping that length, he pawed over the rest of Sander’s small store. “Look you, Planman!”
The Trader held a fistful of the ship’s stuff closer to the old man.
“Whence had you this?” the latter demanded.
“There was a ship, one caught in the sea-desert. This came from the inside of that,” Sander explained. The Planner must be half-smith, himself, or have an eye smith-trained, else he would not have seen that it was any different from what they might find in a ruined city.
“And this ship was of metal?” demanded the Planman.
“All of metal. There were dead men within its belly, and they were not bones.”
To his surprise the Planman nodded. “It is then like unto the one Gaffred uncovered in the mountains last year, one made to travel under the surface of the water.”
That, to Sander’s incomprehension, appeared to convert the Planman from suspicion to at least the first stage of offering hospitality. Fanyi repeated that her animals would not enter the town, which for a short period raised again a chorus of doubts from the Traders. But at length it was agreed that Sander take housing with their smith (who had suffered an injury, which had left them for a time without a worker), while Fanyi would be allowed to stay without, camping in one of their trail wagons now parked for the season.
Sander did not like being separated from the girl. She had let these people assume that they had been drifting along together, two lost ones without kin, saying nothing of the strange storage place she sought. He had followed her lead, as after all hers was the claim on the site to which that finder of the Before Time served as a guide. But he thought that the Traders believed there was some deeper tie between them than just expediency and so considered him hostage to warrant Fanyi’s presence.
Sander knew that to be untrue. There was nothing to prevent the girl from going off by night. And if she did so disappear, his lot among the Traders was going to be anything but easy. There was also the knowledge of the White Ones heading this way. But when he mentioned them, he discovered the Traders were confident of their own means of defense.
Kaboss, the smith, greeted Sander’s arrival with a hardly enthusiastic grunt. He surveyed the plainsman’s kit of tools, not quite with a sniff of disparagement, but with the air of a man who had in the past discarded as unworthy very similar pieces. The bits of ship wiring, however, intrigued him. And he put Sander through a most exhaustive examination concerning everything he had observed about that stranded hulk.
One of Kaboss’s own heavy hands was wrapped in bandages, and once or twice when he flexed his fingers without thought, he gave an exclamation of pain. He allowed Sander to eat—such a bowl of well-seasoned stew as the plainsman had not tasted since he left the Mob—and then bore him to the smithy where he pointed out a pile of repair work that had stacked up there because of his injury. Like any Trader he haggled over terms, but at last Sander struck a bargain that was satisfactory enough and went to work with a will.
Rhin had been quartered in a stable and given a gorge-feed of dried meat. Now after licking his paws, sore from the travel in the mountains, the koyot had gone to sleep.
Sander paid close attention to his work, though the time for it was short, since the day had been well advanced before they had reached the Traders’ town. Yet also he tried to think what might come next. That Fanyi would calmly settle down as a part of this clan, even if she were granted full kin-right, he did not believe. And neither would he stay if she went.
Kaboss was full smith and would take over again entirely once his hand healed. Sander had left his own people rather than be counted apprentice for more years. He had no intention of playing that role among strangers. And in spite of what he continued to tell himself was reasonable common sense, he did believe that the Shaman knew something when she talked of a storage place of knowledge. The pendant had more than half converted him to her point of view. He had never heard or seen anything like that before.
Kaboss’s household was small. His housemate was a silent woman, looking older than her chosen man, her hair streaked with gray, though she was dressed in a manner to show the importance of their household, wearing a thick necklace of much burnished copper, four silver rings, and a belt of silver links about her dull green robe. She did not speak often and then only to the serving maid, who scuttled about, an anxious frown on her face as if this were a mistress no one could hope to please.
There was no sign of an apprentice. Then Kaboss mentioned that he had such, a younger son of his brother, but he had been gone for some days now on an expedition scouting for metal to the north.
Under questioning, Sander told something of their trip, their meeting with the amphibians, and the attack of the monster upon the house on the one-time island. Kaboss was much interested in that portion of his tale.
“Such are still to be found then!” he commented. “They were once so great a danger that we could not hunt lest they corner us. Then we had a great roundup, calling in the clan of Meanings and the clan of Hart, and that day we killed full twelve of them. Since, they have troubled us no more, so we thought them all gone. Now come these you call the White Ones, also to cause danger. The stream people—they are of little account. One can handle them easily enough on land.”
The woman suddenly leaned a little forward in her cushioned chair. She stared intently at Sander, as if she heard nothing Kaboss had said, or if she did, it meant but little. Now she pointed to their visitor.
“Tell me, stranger, why do you wear iron in that fashion about your head?”
He had forgotten the twisted wire he had set there in hope of not repeating that experience with what Fanyi termed the “seeking thought.” Now his hand went up to touch the band in half-surprise.
The woman did not wait for his answer but continued:
“You seek the protection of the ‘cold iron,’ is that not the truth, stranger? There has come to you something you cannot understand, something no man seeks, is that not so?”
Kaboss stared from questioner to Sander and back again. Now he edged a little away from the younger man.
“Spirit-touched!”
The woman smiled, not pleasantly. “I wonder that you did not see it for yourself, Kaboss. Yes, he is spirit-touched. And such I will not have under this roof. For it can be he might open a door for what we cannot see or feel. Take him forth and leave him with that other, who frankly says she speaks with that which is not. Do this for the safety of not only this house, but all our clan.”
“Planman Allbert sent him here,” Kaboss began.
“This house is mine, not that of Planman Allbert. And I think if any discover you have sheltered such a one, you will find we have more un-friends than friends.”
Reluctantly, Kaboss arose and beckoned to Sander. “The house is hers,” he said heavily. “So any choice is hers. Come, stranger smith.”
Thus did Sander find himself again in exile, a whispered explanation to the gate guards enough to send him and Rhin packing out into the night.
Still bemused by the rapidity of what had chanced, he started for the tent-wagon that had been assigned Fanyi. He was not in the least surprised to find it empty, even her pack gone. Slinging his own burden up on Rhin, he impressed upon the koyot a need for trailing. And mounted, his koyot’s nose sniffing the trail, he rode out once more.
12
That Kaboss had expelled him so easily from the village without referring to the Planman made Sander uneasy. As he rode on, he pondered what appeared too quick a change of attitude. The woman had certainly made clear her own feelings—which suggested that perhaps the Traders themselves had encountered just such a brain-touching invasion as Sander had met. They knew the meaning of “cold iron,” which had been for a long time a legend. Sander had never known it to be invoked among his own people. Perhaps this circlet would have awakened questions had he worn it while with the Mob, but here the trader-woman had instantly named it for what it was—a protection against the unseen.