“Phas.” His answer came in one word.
“Native here?” Naill persisted.
“No. They brought ’em—First Ship.” He pointed with chin rather than hand to the Kosburgs.
“First Ship!” Naill was startled. He tried to remember the scant information on Janus. Surely the settlers had been established here longer than one generation.
“Came in twenty years ago. These Sky Lovers bought settlement rights from the Karbon Combine and moved in. Only the port’s free land now.”
“Free land . . . ?”
“Free for off-worlders. Rest’s all Sky Lovers’ holdings—family garths—pushing out a little more each year.” Again his chin pointed, this time to that dusky line on the horizon. “Gotta watch yourself ’round these phas. Look peaceful but they ain’t always—not with strangers. They can use them teeth to crack up more’n a borlag nut, do they want to.”
The teeth were long and white, startlingly so against the dark body fur of the animals, and very much on display. But the phas themselves appeared to be completely absorbed in eating and paid no attention to the men.
“Holla!” Kosburg, the elder, bellowed enough to excite even the phas. “Get them animals ready to move out. You”—his wave put Naill in motion back to his own wagon—”climb up.”
As the afternoon wore on, the supply of lattamus bushes dwindled in the roadside fields. Here and there were patches of grain or vegetables, the fences about them of a lighter shade, as if they had weathered for only a short space of time.
And always that dusky shadow crept toward them . . . or that was the way Naill felt it moved—a shadow advancing toward the men and carts, not men and carts creeping up to it. Now it was clearly a dark wall of trees, and here were evidences that it had not been dispossessed easily. Vast stumps stood in the fields, some of them smoking as if eaten by fires kept burning to utterly destroy them. Naill had a vision of the labor needed to win such a field from virgin forest, and he drew a deep breath of wonder.
He tried to put together what he knew or could guess about the garths and the men who worked them. Clothing, carts, the allusions in the speech of both Kosburgs and that of the laborer-driver led Naill to believe that this was a sect settlement. There had been many of those through the centuries after the first Terrans ventured into deep space and began their colonization of other worlds. Groups knit together by some strong belief sought out empty worlds on which to plant their private utopias undisturbed by “worldly” invaders. Some had become so eccentric as to warp life on them into a civilization totally alien to the past of the first settlers. Others liberalized, or dwindled forgotten, leaving only ruins and graves to mark vanished dreams.
Naill was uneasy. Farm labor would be backbreakingly hard. He had expected that. A fanatical belief was something else, a menace which was, to his mind, worse than any natural danger on a strange planet. The Free Traders were also free believers, their cosmopolitan descents and occupations making for wide tolerance of men and ideas. The guiding spirit of Malani’s kindly home world had been recognized by the worshipers there as a gentle and benevolent Power. The narrow and rigid molds that some men cast their belief in a Force above and beyond theimselves were as much a peril to a stranger in their midst as a blaster in the hands of an avowed enemy. And now that sinister talk of “lessoning,” which young Kosburg had used earlier, struck home to Naill.
He longed passionately for a chance to ask questions. But again such inquiries as he wanted to make might well bring down upon him the very attention he wished least to attract. Those questions—concerning religion and purpose—were oftentimes forbidden, even to the followers within the mold of a fanatical community. No—better to watch, listen, try to put the pieces together for himself now.
The wagon turned from the road into a narrower lane and then passed the gate in a stake wall higher than any field partition, one that might have been erected as a defense rather than to mark a division between one section of land and the next. And their arrival was greeted by baying.
Hounds—enough like the Terran animals that had borne that designation to be named so—a half dozen of them, running and leaping behind another and lower fence, were slavering out their challenge to the newcomers. Naill watched that display. What menace, living in the shadow of the now plainly visible forest, moved the garth dwellers to keep such a pack? Or—there was a chill between his shoulder blades, creeping down his spine—were those guards to keep workers like himself in line?
The carts pulled on into a hollow square, surrounded by buildings, and Naill forgot the hounds momentarily to gape at the main house of the garth. That—that—thing—was fully as tall as two stories of the Korwar Dipple, but it was a single tree trunk laid on its side, with windows cut in two rows, and a wide door of still-scaled bark. Why—the stumps he marveled at in the fields were but the remains of saplings compared to this monstrosity! What kind of trees did make up the forests of Janus?
THREE
TREASURE TROVE
Naill leaned against the supporting haft of the big stripping ax. On his body, bare to the waist, silver dust was puddled into patches by sweat. Overhead the sun, which had seemed so pale on that first day of his arrival, proved its force with waves of heat. His head turned, as it so often had these past weeks, toward the cool green of the woods they were attacking. The dim reaches of dark green were as promising as a pool into which a man could plunge his sweating, heat-seared body—to relax, to dream.
Kosburg had lost no time, after their arrival at this Fringe garth, in outlining to his new hands all the dire dangers of that woodland which beckoned so enticingly. And not the least of those perils was marked by the solitary, ruined hut he had shown them, well within one strip of forest that licked out into his painfully freed acres. It was now cursed land, which no man would dare to trouble. That hut—they viewed it from a safe distance—had been, and still was, the tomb of a sinner, one who had offended so greatly against the Sky as to be struck down by the Green Sick.
The Believers did not kill—no, they simply abandoned to the chill loneliness of the forest those who contracted that incurable disease, which was sent to them as a punishment. And what sufferer raving in the high fever of the first stages could survive alone and untended in the wild? Also—who knew what other dangers lurked under the shadow of the great trees? There were the monsters, seen from time to time, always viewed in the early morning before the sun’s rising, or in the twilight.
Naill wondered about those “monsters.” The stories Kosburg’s household related with a relish were wild enough, but the creature or creatures described were surely born from over-vivid imaginations. The tales agreed only upon the fact that the unknown was nearly the same color as the vegetation wherein it sheltered and that it had four limbs. As to whether it walked erect on two, or ran on four, the information appeared to be divided. And against it the hounds of the garths had an abiding hate.
Curiosity was not one of the character traits the settlers either possessed or encouraged. Naill’s first fears concerning the society on Janus had been fully substantiated. The belief of the Sky Lovers was a narrow, fiercely reactionary one. Those living on the garths might well have stepped back a thousand years or more into the past history of their kind.
There was no desire to learn anything of the native Janus, only dogged, day-in, day-out efforts to tame the land, make it conform to their own off-world pattern of life. Where another type of settler would have gone exploring into the vastness of the forest lands, the Sky Lovers shunned the woods, except when armed with ax, lopping knife, shovel, and the thirst for breaking, chopping, digging.
“You—Renfro—bend to it!”
That was Lasja tramping into the half-hacked clearing, his own ax across his shoulder. He had been the longest in Kosburg’s labor service and so took upon himself the hustling of the latest comers. Behind him came Tylos carrying a slopping water bucket, his face puckered in an attempt to act out the pain such a vast effort cost him.
The ex-crook from Korwar was striving to use every wile and trick he had learned in his spotted past to make life for himself as easy as he could. His first day at clearing had brought him back early to the garthstead with a swollen ankle from what Naill thought was a carefully calculated misstroke of a grubbing hook. Hobbling about the buildings, he then strove to ingratiate himself in the kitchen and weaving house, his quick, sly tongue as busy as his hands were slow, until the womenfolk of Kosburg’s establishment accepted him as part of their aids to labor. So he escaped the fields, though Naill, having heard the flaying tongue of the mistress of the household in full flap, doubted whether Tylos had won the better part.