Yurth Burden
by Andre Norton
1.
The Raski girl made Demon Horns with two fingers of her left hand and spat between them. That droplet of moisture landed, dust covered, on the rutted clay of the road just missing the edge of Elossa’s stained travel cloak. She did not look at the girl but kept her eyes turned to those distant mountain rises, her goal.
In the town hate was a foul cloud to stifle her. She should have avoided the village. None of Yurth blood ever went into one of the native holdings if they could help it. Broadcast hate so deep gnawed at one’s Upper Sense, clouded reception, muddied the thoughts. But she had had to have food. A tumble on a stream’s stepping stones in the past evening dusk had turned the supplies she carried in her belt pouch into a sticky mess she had jettisoned that morning.
The merchant whose stall she had visited had been surly and sullen. However, he had not had the courage to refuse her when she made a quick choice. All those eyes, and the waves of hate. . . . Now, when she judged she was well beyond the girl who had given her that last salute, Elossa walked faster.
A Yurth man or woman moved with dignity among the Raski, just as they ignored the natives, looking over and around them as if they were not Yurth and Raski were as different as light and dark, mountain and plain, heat and cold. There was no common ground for their meeting ever.
Yet they shared the same world, ate the same food, breathed the same air. Even some among her kin had dark hair resembling that the Raski wore in tight rolls about their heads, and their skins were not unlike in color. That of the Raski might be brown by birth, but the Yurth, living as they did ever under the sky and the fierce sun, also tanned darkly. Put a Yurth, even herself, into the bodice and ankle-sweeping skirt of the girl who had so graphically made her hate clear, let her hair grow and twist it up, and she might have looked no, or little, different. It was only in the mind, she thought, that Yurth stood apart.
It had always been so. The Upper Sense was a Yurth child’s from birth. He or she was trained in its use before plain talk came from the lips. For the Upper Sense was all which stood between them and utter annihilation.
Zacar was not an easy world. Storms of terrible force came in the bleak season, sealing Yurth clans into their mountain burrows, blasting, and overwhelming the towns and the dwelling on the plains. Wind, hail, freezing winds, rain in drowning torrents. . . . All life sought shelter when those struck. That is why the Pilgrimage was only possible during the two months of early autumn, why she must hurry to find her goal.
Elossa dug her staff point into the crumbling clay and turned aside from the road which served farms she could see, the houses squatting drably some distance ahead. For the road, such as it was, angled away from the mountains she must reach. She longed to be out of the plains, higher up into the places of her own heritage, where one could breathe air untainted by dust, think thoughts unassailed by the hate which clogged about any Raski gathering place.
That she must make this journey alone was in keeping with the custom of her people. On the day the clan women had gathered to bring her staff, cloak, supply bag, she had known a sinking of heart which was not quite fear. To travel out into the unknown alone. . . . But that was the heritage of Yurth, and each girl and boy did so when their bodies were ready for the duties of Elders, their minds fallow enough to receive the Knowledge. Some never returned. Those who did were-changed.
They were able to set up barriers between themselves and their fellows, sealing out thought talk when they wished. Also they were graver, preoccupied, as if some part of the Knowledge, or perhaps the whole of it, had been a burden fastened on them. But they were Yurth, and as Yurth must return to the cradle of the clan, accept the Knowledge, however bitter or troublesome that might be.
It was the Knowledge which would itself guide them to their goal. They must leave their minds open until a thought thread would draw them. The coming of that was the command they must obey. She had tramped for four days now, the strange urgency working ever in her, bringing her by the shortest route across the plains to the mountains she now faced, the land no one visited now unless the Call came.
She had often speculated with those of her own birth age as to what must lie there. Two of their company had gone and returned. However, to ask them what they had done, or seen, was forbidden by custom. The barrier was already set in them. Thus the mystery always remained a mystery until one was led oneself to discover the truth.
Why did the Raski hate them so, Elossa wondered. It must be because of the Upper Sense. The plains dwellers lacked that. But there was something else. She was different from the hoose, the kannen, all the other life which Yurth respected and strove to aid. She did not wear upon her body, slender beneath her enveloping cloak, dust plastered from the road, fur or scales. Yet there was no hate for her in the minds of those others. Wariness, yes, if the creature was new come into the places of the clan. But that was natural. Why, then, did those who possessed bodies like her own beat at her with black hate in their thoughts if she was forced by some chance to move among them as she had done this morning?
Yurth did not seek to command-even those of lesser and weaker minds. All creatures had their limitations- even as did the Yurth. Some of her kin were keener witted, faster to mind-speak, producing thoughts which were new, unusual enough to make one chew upon them in solitude. But Yurth did not have rulers or ruled. There were customs, such as the Pilgrimage, which all followed when the time was ripe. Still no one ordered that this be so. Rather did those obeying such customs recognize within themselves that this must be done without question.
Twice, she had heard, in the years before her birth, long ago by the reckoning of the clan, the King-Head of the Raski had sent armies to seek out and destroy the Yurth. Once those reached the mountains they had fallen into the net of illusions which the Elders could weave at will.
Men broke out of disciplined companies, wandered lost, until they were subtly set back on their path again. Into the mind of the King-Head himself was inserted a warning. So that when his brave soldiers came straggling back, foot worn, exhausted, he returned to his city stronghold, and did not plan a third mountain expedition. Thereafter the Yurth were let strictly alone and the mountain land was theirs.
But among the Raski there were rulers and ruled, and they were, as far as Elossa had been able to tell, the sorrier for that. Some men and women toiled all their lives that others might live free and turn their hands to no task. That this was a part of their otherness was true, and perhaps those who toiled had little liking for it. Did they hate their masters with some of the same black hatred that they turned toward the Yurth? Was that hate rooted in a bitter and abiding envy of the freedom and fellowship of the clans? But how could that be, what Raski knew how the clans lived? They lacked the mind-speak and could not so rove away from their bodies to survey what lay at a distance.
Elossa quickened pace again. To be away from this! She was fanciful. Surely no tongue of that black ill-wishing she had “seen” with the Upper Sense reached after her like the claws of a sargon. Fancies such as that were for children, not one old enough to be summoned for the Pilgrimage. The sooner, however, that she was in the foothills, the more at ease she would be.
Thus she walked steadily as the fields about gave way from ordered rows of grain to pasturage, well grazed by hoose teeth. Those patient animals themselves raised their heads as she passed. She gave them silent greeting, which seemed so much to astound them that here and there one shook its head or snorted. A younger one came trotting to parallel her way, watching her, Elossa felt, wistfully. In its mind she detected a dim memory of running free with no rein or lead cord to check that racing.