There was a strange light deep in the shaman’s eyes. Travis did not know who or what Menlik had been before the Red conditioner had returned him to the role of Horde shaman. He might have been a technician or scientist—and deep within him some remnants of that training could now be dismissing everything Travis said as fantastic superstition.
Yet in another way the Apache spoke the exact truth. There was a curse on these weapons, on every bit of knowledge gathered in that warehouse of the towers. As Menlik had already noted, that curse was power, the power to control Topaz, and then perhaps to reach back across the stars to Earth.
When the shaman spoke again his words were a half whisper. “It will take a powerful curse to keep these out of the hands of men.”
“With the Russians gone or powerless,” Buck asked, “what need will anyone have for them?”
“And if another ship comes from the skies—to begin all over again?”
“To that we shall have an answer, also, if and when we must find it,” Travis replied. That could well be true . . . other weapons in the warehouse powerful enough to pluck a spaceship out of the sky, but they did not have to worry about that now.
“Arms from a tomb. Yes, this is truly dead men’s magic. I shall say so to my people. When do we move out?”
“When we know whether or not the trap to the south is sprung,” Buck answered.
The report came an hour after sunrise the next morning when Tsoay, Nolan, and Deklay padded into camp. The war chief made a slight gesture with one hand.
“It is done?” Travis wanted confirmation in words.
“It is done. The Pinda-lick-o-yi entered the ship eagerly. Then they blew it and themselves up. Manulito did his work well.”
“And Kaydessa?”
“The woman is safe. When the Russians saw the ship, they left their machine outside to hold her captive. That mechanical caller was easily destroyed. She is now free and with the mba’a she comes across the mountains, Manulito and Eskelta with her also. Now—” he looked from his own people to the Mongols, “why are you here with these?”
“We wait, but the waiting is over,” Jil-Lee said. “Now we go north!”
18
They lay along the rim of a vast basin, a scooping out of earth so wide they could not sight its other side. The bed of an ancient lake, Travis speculated, or perhaps even the arm of a long-dried sea. But now the hollow was filled with rolling waves of golden grass, tossing heavy heads under the flowing touch of a breeze with the exception of a space about a mile ahead where round domes—black, gray, brown—broke the yellow in an irregular oval around the globular silver bead of a spacer: a larger ship than that which had brought the Apaches, but of the same shape.
“The horse herd . . . to the west.” Nolan evaluated the scene with the eyes of an experienced raider. “Tsoay, Deklay, you take the horses!”
They nodded, and began the long crawl which would take them two miles or more from the party to stampede the horses.
To the Mongols in those domelike yurts horses were wealth, life itself. They would come running to investigate any disturbance among the grazing ponies, thus clearing the path to the ship and the Russians there. Travis, Jil-Lee, and Buck, armed with the star guns, would spearhead that attack—cutting into the substance of the ship itself until it was a sieve through which they could shake out the enemy. Only when the installations it contained were destroyed, might the Apaches hope for any assistance from the Mongols, either the outlaw pack waiting well back on the prairie or the people in the yurts.
The grass rippled and Naginlta poked out a nose, parting stems before Travis. The Apache beamed an order, sending the coyotes with the horse-raiding party. He had seen how the animals could drive hunted split-horns; they would do as well with the ponies.
Kaydessa was safe, the coyotes had made that clear by the fact that they had joined the attacking party an hour earlier. With Eskelta and Manulito she was on her way back to the north.
Travis supposed he should be well pleased that their reckless plan had succeeded as well as it had. But when he thought of the Tatar girl, all he could see was her convulsed face close to his in the ship corridor, her raking nails raised to tear his cheek. She had an excellent reason to hate him, yet he hoped . . .
They continued to watch both horse herd and domes. There were people moving about the yurts, but no signs of life at the ship. Had the Russians shut themselves in there, warned in some way of the two disasters which had whittled down their forces?
“Ah—!” Nolan breathed.
One of the ponies had raised its head and was facing the direction of the camp, suspicion plain to read in its stance. The Apaches must have reached the point between the herd and the domes which had been their goal. And the Mongol guard, who had been sitting cross-legged, the reins of his mount dangling close to his hand, got to his feet.
“Ahhhuuuuu!” The ancient Apache war cry that had sounded across deserts, canyons, and southwestern plains to ice the blood, ripped just as freezingly through the honey-hued air of Topaz.
The horses wheeled, racing upslope away from the settlement. A figure broke from the grass, flapped his arms at one of the mounts, grabbed at flying mane, and pulled himself up on the bare back. Only a master horseman would have done that, but the whooping rider now drove the herd on, assisted by the snapping and snarling coyotes.
“Deklay—” Jil-Lee identified the reckless rider, “that was one of his rodeo tricks.”
Among the yurts it was as if someone had ripped up a rotten log to reveal an ants’ nest and sent the alarmed insects into a frenzy. Men boiled out of the domes, the majority of them running for the horse pasture. One or two were mounted on ponies that must have been staked out in the settlement. The main war party of Apaches skimmed silently through the grass on their way to the ship.
The three who were armed with the alien weapons had already tested their range by experimentation back in the hills, but the fear of exhausting whatever powered those barrels had curtailed their target practice. Now they snaked to the edge of the bare ground between them and the ladder hatch of the spacer. To cross that open space was to provide targets for lances and arrows—or the superior armament of the Russians.
“A chance we can hit from here.” Buck laid his weapon across his bent knee, steadied the long barrel of the burner, and pressed the firing button.
The closed hatch of the ship shimmered, dissolved into a black hole. Behind Travis someone let out the yammer of a war whoop.
“Fire—cut the walls to pieces!”
Travis did not need that order from Jil-Lee. He was already beaming unseen destruction at the best target he could ask for—the side of the sphere. If the globe was armed, there was no weapon which could be depressed far enough to reach the marksmen at ground level.
Holes appeared, irregular gaps and tears in the fabric of the ship. The Apaches were turning the side of the globe into lacework. How far their fire penetrated into the interior they could not guess.
Movement at one of the holes, the chattering burst of machine-gun fire, spatters of soil and gravel into their faces; they could be cut to pieces by that! The hole enlarged, a scream . . . cut off . . .
“They will not be too quick to try that again,” Nolan observed with cold calm from behind Travis’ post.
Methodically they continued to beam the ship. It would never be space-borne again; there were neither the skills nor materials here to repair such damage.
“It is like laying a knife to fat,” Lupe said as he crawled up beside Travis. “Slice, slice—!”
“Move!” Travis reached to the left, pulled at Jil-Lee’s shoulder.
Travis did not know whether it was possible or not, but he had a heady vision of their combined fire power cutting the globe in half, slicing it crosswise with the ease Lupe admired.
They scurried through cover just as someone behind yelled a warning. Travis threw himself down, rolled into a new firing position. An arrow sang over his head; the Russians were doing what the Apaches had known they would—calling in the controlled Mongols to fight. The attack on the ship must be stepped up, or the Amerindians would be forced to retreat.
Already a new lacing of holes appeared under their concentrated efforts. With the gun held tight to his middle, Travis found his feet, zigzagged across the bare ground for the nearest of those openings. Another arrow clanged harmlessly against the fabric of the ship a foot from his goal.