The Horse Barbarians tds-3 Read online

  “I can keep secrets, too,” Jason told Ahankk, who rode close, scowling, but he received only a fine selection of grating curses in return. As soon as the warlord appeared, they rode off in a double column, following his lead.

  It was hard riding and Jason was thankful for the weeks he had spent in the saddle. At first they started toward the foothills to the east, but as soon as they were hidden from sight of the camp and sure that they were not observed by stragglers, they turned and moved south at a ground-eating pace. The mountains rose up on all sides of them as they rode from valley to valley, climbing steadily. Jason, breathing through his fur neckpiece, could not believe that throat-hurting air could be so cold, yet it did not seem to bother anyone else.

  They grabbed a quick, unheated meal at sunset, then kept on going. Jason could see the sense in this; he had almost frozen to the ground during their brief halt. They were in single file now. The trail was so narrow that Jason, like many of the others, dismounted to lead his morope, in an attempt to warm himself above the congealing point by the exertion. The cold light of the star-filled sky lit their way.

  Coming to a junction of two valleys, Jason looked to his right, at the gray sea spreading out in the distance beyond the nearly vertical cliffs. Sea?! He stopped so suddenly that his Inorope trod on his heels and he had to jump aside to avoid being trampled.

  No, it couldn’t be the sea. They were in the middle of the continent. And too high up. Realization came late, he was looking at a sea rightly enough, the top of a sea of clouds. Jason watched until a turn in the trail took them from sight. The trail was dipping downward now as he knew it must. He halted his inorope so that he could climb back into the saddle. Somewhere up ahead was the edge of the world.

  Here the domain of the nomads ended at the continent, spanning cliff, a solid wall of rock reaching up from the plains below. Here also, was where the weather ended. The warm southern winds blowing north struck the cliff, were forced upward and condensed as clouds, to then bring their burden of water back to the land below as rain. Jason wondered if they ever saw the sun at all this close to the escarpment. A glistening dusting of snow in the hollows showed that severe storms pushed even over the top of this natural barrier.

  As the trail dropped it passed through a narrow pass and, once inside, Jason saw a stone hut under an overhang of rock, where guards stood and stoically watched them pass. Whatever their destination was, it must be close. A short while later they halted and word was passed back to Jason to wait on Temuchin. He shuffled to the head of the procession as fast as his numbed muscles would permit.

  Temuchin was chewing steadily on a resistant piece of dried meat, and Jason had to wait until he had washed this morsel down with some of the half-frozen achadh. The sky was lightening in the east and, by the traditional nomad test, it was almost dawn, the moment when a black goat’s hair could be told from a white.

  “Bring my inorope,” Temuchin commanded as he strode away. Jason grabbed the reins of the tired, snapping beast and dragged it after the warlord. Three officers followed after him. The trail took two more sharp turnings and opened out onto a broad ledge, the farther side of which was the sheer edge of the cliff. Temuchin walked over and stared down at white-massed clouds not far below. But it was the rusty chunk of machinery that fascinated Jason.

  The most impressive part was the massive A frame that was seated deep into the living rock at the cliff’s edge, projecting outward and overhanging the abyss below. This had been hand-forged, all eight meters of its length, and what a prodigious labor that must have been. It was stabilized with cross-brace rods and rested against a ridge of rock at the lip of the drop that raised it to a 45-degree angle. The entire frame was pitted and scratched with rust, although some attempt had been made to keep it greased. A length of flexible black material led over a pulley wheel at the point of the A and back through a hole in a buttress of rock behind. Aroused now by curiosity, Jason went around the rock to admire the device behind it.

  In its own way, this engine, though smaller, was more spectacular than the supporting frame on the cliff. The black ropelike material came through the hole and wound around a drum. This drum, on an arm-thick shaft, was held to the back of the vertical rock face by four sturdy legs. It could obviously take an immense strain as there was nothing to uproot: all of the pressure would be carried directly to the rock face, seating the legs even more firmly. A meter-wide gear wheel, fitted to the end of the drum, meshed with a smaller pinion gear that could be turned by a long crank handle. This was appareiitly made of wood, but Jason did not pay much attention to the fact. A number of pawls and ratchets made sure that nothing could slip.

  It could not take a mechanical genius to understand what the device was for. Jason turned to Temuchin, forcefully controlling the tendency for one eyebrow to lift, and said: “Is this the mechanism by which we are supposed. to descend to the lowlands?”

  The warlord seemed about as impressed by the machine as Jason was himself.

  “It is. It does not appear to be the sort of thing one would usually risk one’s life with, but we have no choice. The tribe which built and operated it, a branch of the stoat clan, have sworn that they used it often to raid the lowlands. They told many tales, and had wood and gunpowder to prove it. The survivors are here and they will operate the thing. They will be killed if there is any trouble. We will go first.”

  “That won’t help us very much if something goes wrong.”

  “Man is born to die. Life consjsts only of a daily putting off of the inevitable.”

  Jason had no answer to this one. He looked up as, with pained cries, a group of men and squat women were driven down the hill toward the winch.

  “Stand back and let them do their work,” Temuchin ordered, and the soldiers instantly withdrew. “Watch them closely and if there is treachery or mistakes, kill them at once.”

  Thus encouraged, the stoat clansmen turned to their jobs. They appeared to know what they were doing. Some turned the handle while others adjusted the clanking pawis. One man even pulled himself out on the frame, far over the cliff’s edge, to grease the pulley wheel on its end.

  “I will go first,” Temuchin said, slinging a heavy leather harness around his body under his arms, “I hope that rope thing is long enough,” Jason said, and instantly regretted it when Temuchin turned to glare at him.

  “You will come next, after you have sent down my morope. See that it is blindfolded so it does not panic. Then you, then another Inorope, in that order. The inoropes will be brought to the cliff only one at a time so they do not see what is happening to the others.” He turned to the officers. “You have heard my orders.”

  Chanting in unison, the stoats turned the handle to wind the rope onto the drum, the pawls slowly clanking over. The pressure came on the harness but the rope stretched and thinned before Temuchin was lifted from the ground. Then his toes swung clear and he grabbed the rope as he swung out over the abyss, oscillating slowly up and down. When the bobbing had damped the operators reversed the motion and he slowly dropped from sight. Jason went to the lip and saw the warlord’s figure get smaller and finally vanish into the woolly clouds below. A piece of rock broke loose under the pressure of Jason’s toe and he stepped backward quickly.

  Every hundred meters, more or less, the men slowed and worked cautiously as a blob appeared where two sections of the elastic rope were joined together. They turned the handle carefully until the knot had cleared the pulley, then went back to their normal operating speed. Men changed positions on the cranks without stopping so that the rope moved out and down continuously.

  “What is this rope?” Jason asked one of the stoats who seemed to be supervising the operation, a greasy-haired individual whose only tooth appeared to be a yellowed fang that projected above his upper lip.

  “Plant things, growing things-long with leaves. What you call them inentri—”

  “Vines?” Jason guessed.

  “Yah, vines. Big, hard to find. Crow
down the cliff. Stretch and very strong.”

  “They had better be,” Jason said, then pointed and grabbed the man as the vine rope suddenly began to bounce up and down. He wriggled in Jason’s numbing grip and hurried to explain.

  “All right, good. That means the’ man is down, let the vine go; it bounces up and down. Bring up!” he added, shouting at the crank operators.

  Jason loosened his grip on the man, who moved quickly away rubbing the injured spot. It made sense; when Temuchin had let go of the rope, the sudden decrease in weight on the cable would have caused it to oscillate, though not too much. His weight was surely only a small part of the overall weight of that massive length of cable.

  “The inorope next,” Jason ordered when the hook and sling were finally hauled up to the cifftop once more. The beast was led forward, blinking its red little eyes suspiciously at the brink ahead. The stoats efficiently fitted a broad harness about its body, then covered its eyes with a leather sack pulled down tight and tied under its jaw. After the hook had been attached, the morope stood patiently until it began to feel its weight coming off the ground. Then, panic-stricken, it began to struggle, its claws raking grooves in the dirt and cracking chips from the stone. But the operators had experience with this as well. The man whom Jason had been talking to ran up with a long-handled sledgehammer and, with a practiced swing, hit a mark en the bag, which must have been right above the creature’s eyes. It went instantly limp. With much shouting and heaving, the dead weight was swung clear of the ground and started over the edge.

  “Hit just right,” the man said. “Too hard, kill it, Not hard enough, it wake up soon and jump around, break rope.”

  “Well hit,” Jason said, and hoped that Temuchin was not standing directly below.

  Nothing appeared to be wrong and the rope vine clanked out endlessly. Jason found himself dozing off and stepped farther back from the edge. Suddenly there were shouts and he opened his eyes to see the rope jerking back and forth, heaving with great bounces. It even jumped from the pulley and one of the men had to climb up to reseat it.

  “Did it break?” Jason asked the nearest operator.

  “No, good, all fine. Just bounce big when the morope come off.”

  This was understandable. When the greater weight of the large beast was removed the elastic vine would do a great deal of heaving about. The motion had damped and they were bringing it up now. Jason realized that he was next and was aware of a definite dropping sensation in his stomach. He would have given a great deal not to suffer a descent on this iron-age elevator.

  The beginning alone was bad enough. He realized that his feet were dragging free of the rock as the tension came on the vine and he automatically scratched with his toes, trying to stay on the solid mountaintop. He did not succeed. The wheel turned another clank and he was airborne, swinging out from the cliff and above the cloud-bottomed drop. He took one look down between his twirling feet, then riveted his attention straight ahead. The clifftop slowly rose above his head and the grim-faced nomads vanished from sight. He tried to think of something funny to say but, for once, was completely out of humorous ideas. Rotating slowly as he dropped, he could, for the first time, see the continent-spanning cliff sweeping away on both sides and could appreciate the incredible vastness of it. The air was clear and dry with the early-morning sun lighting up the rock face so that every detail could be plainly seen.

  Below was the white sea of the clouds, washing and breaking against the base of the continentwide cliff. The jagged gray mountains that could be seen rising behind it were dwarfed by comparison. Against the immensity of this cliff, Jason felt like a spider on a thread, drifting down an endless wall, moving yet seemingly suspended forever at the same spot because the scale was so large. As he rotated, he looked first right, then left, and in each direction the grained escarpment ran straight to the horizon, still erect and sky-touching where it dimmed and vanished.

  Jason could see now that the point on the cliff above, where the winch had been placed, was much lower than the rest of the stone barrier. He assumed that there was a matching rise in the ground below, for at any other spot along the cliff the length of the vine rope would not have been strong enough to support its own weight, exclusive of any added burden. The clouds rose up steadily below him until he felt he could almost reach out and kick them. Then the first damp tendrils of the fog touched him, and a few moments later the clouds closed around and he was alone in the gray world of nothingness.

  The last thing that he expected to do, dangling at the end of the kilometer-long bobbing strand, was to fall asleep. But he did. The rocking motion, the fatigue of the day and night ride, and the blankness of his surroundings all contributed their bit. He relaxed, his head dropped, and in a few moments he was snoring lustily.

  He awoke when the rain began trickling inside his collar and down his back. Though the air was much warmer he shivered and pulled his collar tight. It was one of those drizzling, dripping all-day rains that seem never to end. Through it he could make out the streaked face of the cliff still moving by, and when he bent and looked between his toes, something indeterminate was visible below. What? People? Friend or foe? If the locals knew about the winch that was out of sight in the clouds above, they might possibly keep a massacre party waiting here. He swung the war ax out of his belt and slipped the thong about his wrist. Individual boulders were standing out below, set in a drab field of rain-soaked grass. The air was humid and sticky.

  “Unbuckle that harness and be ready to let go of it,” Temuchin ordered, coming into sight as he stalked across the field below. “What is the ax for?”

  “Anyone other than you who might be waiting,” Jason answered, securing the ax in his belt again and working at the leather harness. A sudden stretch on the flexible rope lowered him to within feet of the grass.

  “Let go!” Temuchin ordered, and Jason did, unfortunately just as the rope started up again. He rose a few feet and, for one instant, was suspended in midair, unmoving and unsupported, before he fell heavily. He rolled when he hit and jammed the hilt of his sword painfully into his ribs, but was otherwise undamaged. There was a quick whoosh above them as the rope, relieved of its burden, contracted and snapped upward.

  “This way,” Temuchin said, turning and walking off while Jason struggled to his feet. The grass was slippery and wet, and mud squelched up around his boots when he walked. Temuchin went around a pillar of rock and pointed up at its ten-meter-high summit.

  “You can watch from there to see when your inorope arrives. Wake me then. My beast is grazing on this side. Be sure it does not stray.” Without waiting for an answer, Temuchin lay down in a relatively dry spot in the lee of the rock and pulled a flap of leather over his face.

  Sure, Jason said to himself, just the job I wanted in the rain. A nice wet rock and a tremendous view of absolutely nothing. He pulled himself up the steeply slanted stone and sat down on its rounded peak.

  Thoughts of sleep were gone now; even sitting comfortably was impossible on the knobby hardness, so Jason writhed and suffered. The silence was disturbed only by the endless susurration of the falling rain, broken by an occasional trumpet of satiated joy from the morope as it enjoyed the unaccustomed banquet. From time to time the sheets of rain shifted, opening up a view down the hillside of grass pastures, with quick rivulets and dark-stained stones pushing up through the greenery. Ages of rain and damp discomfort passed before Jason heard hoarse breathing overhead and could make out a dim form dropping down slowly through the haze. He slid to the ground and Temuchin was awake and alert the instant Jason touched his shoulder.

  There was something awe-inspiringly impressive about the great bulk of the limp Inorope, apparently unsupported, that swung down over their heads. Its legs were beginning to twitch and its breathing grew faster.

  “Quickly,” Temuchin ordered. “It is beginning to awake.”

  A sudden bounce dropped the morope lower and they grabbed for it, but the return contraction
pulled it out of reach again. It was beginning to turn its head and was attempting to lift its neck. The next drop brought it almost to the ground and Temuchin leaped for its neck, grabbing it and hanging on, his added weight pulling the foreparts of the creature to the damp ground.

  “Unbuckle it!” he shouted.

  Jason dived for the straps. The buckles were easy-opening, being released by throwing back an iron handle. It would have been impossible to open normal buckles against the tension of the taut, stretched cable. The morope was beginning to thrash about when Jason threw open the last buckle-and leaped clear. The contraction of the elastic cable pulled the harness out from under the morope, raking its flesh so that it bellowed with pain, half flipping it over. The jangling harness, with a departing hiss, instantly vanished from sight in the rain.

  The rest of the day settled into routine. Now that Jason knew what to do, Temuchin proved himself an experienced field soldier by taking advantage of the lull to catch up on his sleep. Jason wished he could join him, but he had been left in charge and he knew better than to try and avoid the responsibility. Soldiers and mounts dropped out of the rain-filled sky at regular intervals and Jason organized the operation. Some of the soldiers watched the field of grazing moropes while others stood by to land the new arrivals. The rest slept, except for Ahankic, who, in Jason’s opinion, seemed to have fine vision and who therefore occupied the lookout position. Twenty-five moropes and a6 men were down before the end suddenly came.

  The work party were half dozing, depressed by the endless rain, when Ahankk’s hoarse call jabbed them to instant awareness. Jason looked up and had a brief vision of a dark form hurtling down, apparently right at them. This was just an illusion of the mist for the morope grew in size and struck the landing spot, plunging to the ground like a falling rock and hitting with a sickening, explosive sound. A great length of rope fell on and around it, the end landing not far from Jason and the soldiers.